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Updated: June 13, 2025
It was old she could tell that much. It was a portrait, tender and quaint. She would have gasped had she known that it was worth a cover of solid gold. It was a Holbein, The Younger, for which Cleigh some years gone had paid Cunningham sixteen thousand dollars. Where and how Cunningham had acquired it was not open history. An hour passed. By and by she rose and tiptoed to the partition.
Some years before the painter's death he took Philip Holbein to Paris, and there apprenticed him to the eminent goldsmith, Jerome David, with whom he remained until a couple of years after Holbein's death. Later, he somehow drifted to Lisbon, where he followed his trade until he settled in the old home of his grandfather and great-grandfather, Augsburg.
"My father picked up all these pictures very cheap at auctions, and so on," he said; "they are all rubbish, except the one over the door, and that is valuable. A man offered five hundred roubles for it last week." "Yes that's a copy of a Holbein," said the prince, looking at it again, "and a good copy, too, so far as I am able to judge.
You do not preach to the acorn that it is its duty to become a large tree; you do not preach to the art-pupil that it is his duty to become a Holbein. You plant your acorn in favourable soil, where it can have light and air, and be sheltered from the wind; you remove the superfluous branches, you train the strength into the leading shoots.
And in the same year, very likely from one of the frequent epidemics so fatal to Basel, died Künegoldt, Elsbeth's youngest child. The Merian family of Frankfurt-am-Main claims an hereditary right to the artistic gifts of its famous copper-engraver, Mathew Merian, as descendants of Holbein through this daughter Künegoldt, who, when she died, was the wife of Andreas Syff, a miller, of Basel.
It was, in truth, a somewhat delicate mission on which his son had sent him, for he could not assert definitely that the hermit actually was Kathleen Holbein's father, and her self-constituted parents did not relish the idea of letting slip, on a mere chance, one whom they loved as a daughter. "Why not bring this man who claims to be her father here?" asked the perplexed Holbein.
But although Holbein never entirely overcame this fault, he did very greatly do so, as the years passed. His architectural settings, too, tended to greater simplicity in his later years. Yet this is not a safe guide. Some early designs have simple forms; some comparatively late ones, a very ornate architecture.
When he was about twenty-one years old he removed to Basle, and there he painted many pictures, though not nearly as many as have been called by his name. About a year after Holbein went to Basle he was called to Lucerne to decorate a house, and he executed other works there and at Altorf.
You may be sure I took no steps to prevent it, and so in a very short time we were both standing before the same picture, a portrait of Holbein the younger. A subject of conversation was ready to hand. "Mademoiselle," said I, "do you like this Holbein?" "You must admit, sir, that the old gentleman is exceedingly plain." "Yes, but the painting is exquisite.
It gains rather than loses by reproduction; since the painting now shows a strange disagreeable colour most unlike the carnations of Holbein. Between the sitter and the green-curtained background stands perhaps the ghastliest of all Holbein's skeletons, one hand on his scythe, the other grimly pointing at the nearly-spent sands of the hour-glass.
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