The remaining years of Holbein’s life must have been busy ones, judging from the number of preliminary studies for portraits of the men and women of Henry’s court which exist in the Windsor Collection and in many of the great European museums. These drawings are all undated, and cover the whole period of his English career, but there are so many of them that his time must have been always fully occupied. It is strange, therefore, that so few of his finished portraits can be ascribed with any certainty to the year 1540. Although it was by no means his invariable custom to put the date on his paintings, yet this was his more usual practice, and there is no known picture by him which is inscribed 1540, though there are a few dated 1541 and 1542. Several portraits of the Howard family can be given with some certainty to the earlier year, but beyond this nothing has been so far discovered. It may be suggested, as some explanation of this, that Holbein paid another visit to Basel during the last quarter of 1540, as the two years’ leave of absence granted him by the Town Council came to an end in the middle of October. The Council, who had been paying his wife the promised yearly pension of forty gulden, expected him to make Basel his permanent residence on the completion of this further extension of leave. The terms of their agreement with him were fairly generous, and it is not to be supposed that the painter would risk losing his rights of citizenship and the stoppage of the pension to his wife through a total disregard of the Council’s wish. It seems possible, therefore, that he went over to Switzerland in order to make personal application for a further and longer leave of absence in England than the agreement of 1538 permitted. Unlike many of the foreign artists and artificers then resident in this country, he never became a naturalised British subject, and this, no doubt, was due to the fact that he was determined to end his days as a citizen of Basel, and regarded his residence here as merely a temporary one, and England as a profitable field which, as time passed, would become worked out. He could not, of course, foresee that he was to be suddenly cut down when a comparatively young man and still in the full maturity of his powers. At Michaelmas in the year in question he received half a year’s salary in advance, so that it was impossible for him to leave England permanently for some time to come.