Holbein by S.L. Bensusan — Read

Hans Holbein the younger is perhaps the most outstanding figure in the history of German art. In the eyes of some he may yield place to his great contemporary Albert Duerer, but it is impossible to deny that for all his indisputable genius Duerer stood for a time that was passing, and Holbein for one that was to come. The younger man touched art at every point, nowhere without mastery; and whether we consider him as a draughtsman, a decorator, a painter of frescoes, a portrait painter, an architect, a modeller, a designer of jewellery, a book illustrator, or a miniaturist, we find ourselves face to face with such an extraordinary measure of achievement, that the claim to remembrance and admiration could be sustained if his art gift had been single instead of universal.

Some men are echoes of their own time. Circumstance has made them what they are; their work, however greatly it may please their generation, does nothing to probe the future, to indicate the direction that thought or taste will follow, nor does it set an example for those who are to come. Hans Holbein the younger is of the smaller and more distinguished class that accepts tradition just so far as it is useful or indispensable, and can face the problems of changing seasons and new thought with perfect confidence and unerring instinct, finding no terror in change. His father was an artist, and this fact would seem to have marked out his path in life.