Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and twice uncle to the king by marriage,
was painted when Anne of Cleves had been retired on a pension, and the
star of Catherine Howard was in its brief ascendant. Holbein is said
to have painted the new queen. There is a miniature as well as a chalk
drawing in Windsor that is said to stand for her. And doubtless the king
would have continued to find new wives, and Holbein would have continued
to paint them, but for the fact that both king and painter were
nearing their end. The portraits of the doctors of the royal household,
Dr. Butt and Dr. Chambers, are among the last of the great works he
accomplished. In the month of October 1843, at the time when the Plague
was in London, the artist made a will which was found some years ago
in the City of London. By this document Hans Holbein sought to protect
two of his illegitimate children of tender age, directing that all his
goods should be sold, and the proceeds applied for their benefit as soon
as certain debts had been paid. Curiously enough, we have no means of
finding out who the children were, we do not know the mother's name,
all is obscure. But we know that Holbein had settled an earlier legacy
upon his wife and legitimate issue, that he had apprenticed his eldest son
to a jeweller in Paris, and that he had never been unmindful of his legal
obligations to his family. For the rest, he had made a hasty marriage
that was not founded upon affection so much as upon convenience--and it
is not for us to judge him save as an artist, and then modestly and with
due thought of our own limitations. He was buried either in the Church
of St. Andrew Undershaft or St. Catherine Cree; in the hour of his death
there was no anxiety to do more than get the dead underground as soon
as possible. It will be remembered that another of the world's great
painters, Titian Vecelli, died of the Plague too, but Titian had reached
a very great age, while Holbein was in the prime of life, capable, had
he been spared, of much more work in every branch of art.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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