When Holbein painted him he was forty-six years old, and his face had coarsened and had lost all its youthful freshness and good looks, but his figure was still erect and kingly, and retained much of its earlier vigour. In the cartoon he stands boldly and firmly on his legs, active and alert, though massive in build, and made still broader in appearance by his rich apparel, heavily padded about the shoulders. It is in the face that his age and the habits of his life are beginning to leave ugly indications, though this is not to be gathered from the cartoon, in which his features, badly rubbed, are now barely discernible. This, however, may not be entirely due to the accidents of time, for as the cartoon was made for the purpose of transferring the leading lines of the composition to the wall, Holbein possibly only indicated the main outlines, leaving the more careful modelling to be done on the wall itself. Sadly damaged as the cartoon is, a mere fragment of the first conception of a great masterpiece, it nevertheless remains a remarkable and precious work of art, doubly valuable in that it not only shows us Holbein’s methods of work, but is also the only record from his own hand we possess to-day in this country of the most important and celebrated painting he produced while in England. The whole composition is drawn in with the point of the brush, in the manner, as Mr. S. Arthur Strong points out, at once broad and minute, of which Holbein seems to have been the solitary master. In this crowd of particulars almost everyone else would have lost sight of the whole, and given us a map instead of a view.[215] Mr. Roger E. Fry speaks of it as one of Holbein’s greatest creations. “It has all the grandeur of style, the lucidity and ease of arrangement of the greatest monumental design of Italy, together with a particularity and minuteness which would seem incompatible with those greater qualities of style had they not been thus wonderfully united. In all the decorative details, too, this great work gives us a measure of Holbein’s impeccable taste at a time when taste was by no means as universal as it had been in earlier centuries.”[216] Footnote 215: S. Arthur Strong, _Reproductions of Drawings by the Old Masters at Chatsworth_, 1902; republished in _Critical Studies and Fragments_, 1905, p. 132. Footnote 216: _Burlington Magazine_, vol. xv., May 1909, p. 74. [Sidenote: DRAWING OF THE KING AT MUNICH] This cartoon was in 1590 in the possession of John, Lord Lumley, at Lumley Castle, and is entered in the inventory of the pictures as “The Statuary of King Henry the Eight and his father Kinge Henry the Seventh Joyned together, doone in white and black by Haunce Holbyn.” It passed subsequently into the collection of the Duke of Devonshire, and has been preserved ever since at Hardwick Hall.[217] Footnote 217: See p. 97, note 3.