English Painters, with a Chapter on American Painters. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
but if so, the invitations were declined. Among lesser names, however, we find that of ANTONIO TOTO, who came here in 1531, and was appointed Serjeant-Painter to the King. None of his works is now recognised. GIROLAMO DA TREVISO is supposed to have designed the historic painting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, formerly at Windsor, and now in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House.
LUCAS CORNELISZ of Leyden (1493—1552), son of Cornelis Engelbrechtsen, came to England and entered the service of the King. It is said that he taught Holbein in some branches of art, and, as he survived the great painter of Augsburg for nine years, it is possible that some of the works attributed to Holbein after 1543 were painted by him.
Henry VIII. seems to have had two other Serjeant-Painters besides Antonio Toto, and previous to the coming of Holbein. These were ANDREW WRIGHT and JOHN BROWN, whose names proclaim them to be natives. These artists or craftsmen had positions of trust and honour, wore a special dress, and received a weekly wage. Jan van Eyck had a similar post as varlet de chambre to Philippe le Bon. It was the age of pageants, and one great duty of the King's artists was to adorn these singular spectacles. Among the archives of the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, is the following curious notice of a religious pageant held at a somewhat earlier date:—
"Memorandum: That Master Cumings hath delivered, the 4th day of July, in the year of Our Lord 1470, to Mr. Nicholas Bettes, Vicar of Radcliffe, Moses Couteryn, Philip Bartholomew, and John Brown, procurators of Radcliffe, beforesaid, a new sepulchre, well gilt, and cover thereto; an image of God rising out of the same sepulchre, with all the ordinance that longeth thereto: that is to say—Item, a lath, made of timber, and iron work thereto. Item, thereto longeth Heaven, made of timber and stained cloth. Item, Hell, made of timber and iron work, with devils in number thirteen. Item, Four knights, armed, keeping the sepulchre, with their weapons in their hands, that is to say, two axes, and two spears. Item, Three pair of angels' wings; four angels, made of timber, and well painted. Item, the Father, the crown, and visage; the ball, with a cross upon it, well gilt with fine gold. Item, the Holy Ghost coming out of heaven into the sepulchre. Item, Longeth to the angels four chevelers."
It is not surprising that art made little progress whilst it was mainly directed to the painting and gilding of timber angels and of solid devils for a hell of iron and wood-work. Things were not much better in the reign of Henry VIII. His love of ostentation made him fond of pageants, and the instructions which he left for his own monument are curious. "The King shall appear on horseback, of the stature of a goodly man while over him shall appear the image of God the Father holding the King's soul in his left hand, and his right hand extended in the act of benediction." This work was to have been executed in bronze, but was never finished. Elizabeth stopped the necessary payments, and the uncompleted figure was sold by an unsentimental and Puritan Parliament for £600. The influence of the Reformation was decidedly antagonistic to art in England and elsewhere. In attempting to reform, the leaders tolerated destruction, and whilst pretending to purify the church they carried away not only the "idols," but much that was beautiful. They literally "broke down the carved work thereof with axes and hammers." Pictures and altar-pieces were ruthlessly destroyed. Fortunately a considerable number of old paintings still exist in our churches. A little work on "Wall Paintings in England," recently published by the Science and Art Department, mentions five hundred and sixty-eight churches and other public buildings in England in which wall paintings and other decorations have been found, all dating from an earlier period than the Reformation, and there are doubtless many not noticed. The branch of art which suffered least from the iconoclastic Reformers was that of portrait-painting, and this received a great impetus in England by the opportune arrival of—
HANS HOLBEIN, the younger, of Augsburg (1497—1543), who came, in 1526, with a recommendation from Erasmus to Sir Thomas More, by whom he was welcomed and entertained at Chelsea. Unlike Albrecht Dürer, the other great German painter of the Reformation epoch, Holbein was a literal painter of men, not a dreamer haunted by visions of saints and angels. His ideas of heaven were probably modelled far more on the plan of the Bristol pageant, than on that of the Italian masters. Such an artist came exactly at the right moment to England, where Protestantism was becoming popular. Holbein's wonderful power as a colourist and the fidelity of his likenesses exercised a lasting effect on English art. He founded no school, however, though he had many imitators among the foreign artists whom Henry had invited.[C]
In 1532 Holbein was made Painter to the King, with a salary of £34 a year, in addition to the payment given for his works. The chief pictures painted by Holbein in England are portraits; and tradition says that Henry specially employed him to delineate the features of any fair lady on whom he had cast a favourable eye. Among the portraits we may mention those of Nicolas Kratzer, Erasmus, Anne of Cleves, and Sir Richard Southwel (in the Louvre); Archbishop Warham (Lambeth Palace); Sir Henry Guildford, a Merchant of the Steelyard, and Lady Rich (Windsor); Lady Vaux and John Reskimer (Hampton Court); Henry VIII.; the Duchess of Milan[D] (Arundel Castle); Sir William and Lady Butts (Mr. W. H. Pole Carew); The Ambassadors, a most important work, and Erasmus (Lord Radnor, Longford Castle). There is at Windsor a series of eighty portraits of the English nobility, drawn by Holbein in black and red chalks, which are of infinite value as works of art; and at Windsor likewise, and in other galleries, are many carefully painted miniatures ascribed to him, of the greatest artistic and historic value.
Hans Holbein, like most artists of his age, could do more than paint portraits. At Basle are noble subject pictures by him. He was an architect, a modeller, and a carver. He was specially gifted in designing wood-blocks for illustrating books, and in the ornamentation of sword-hilts, plate, and the like. A book of designs for jewels, by Holbein, once the property of Sir Hans Sloane, is now in the British Museum. Holbein died of the plague, in London, between October 7th and November 29th, 1543.
Another painter in the service of King Henry VIII. at this time was the above-named GIROLAMO PENNACCHI, who was born at Treviso, in 1497. He was an imitator of Raphael, and painted portraits—chiefly at Genoa, Faenza, Bologna, and Venice, and in 1542 came to England. He was killed by a cannon-ball while acting as a military engineer in the King's service near Boulogne, in 1544. There is an altar-piece by him, signed IERONIMVS TREVISIVS P (No. 623 in the National Gallery.) In the "Old Masters" Exhibition of 1880, was a portrait of Sir T. Gresham (No. 165), a fine whole-length, standing, life-size picture of the famous merchant, with a skull on the pavement at our left. This work is dated 1544, the year of Sir Thomas's marriage, in his twenty-sixth year, and, as we have seen above, of Treviso's death. It is the property of the Gresham Committee of London, and every expert has accepted it as a work of the Italian painter, engineer, and architect, who was important enough to be honoured with a separate biography by Vasari in his "Lives of the Painters." Girolamo's salary from the English King was 400 scudi per annum. Much likeness exists between the art of Gresham's portrait and that of the masterly life-size, whole-length picture of the Earl of Surrey, with his motto, Sat super est, which is one of the chief ornaments of Knole, and almost worthy of Velasquez himself. This picture (which is dated 1546) is attributed to the undermentioned GWILLIM STRETES (or STREET). It is much more like an Italian production than a Dutch one, and so fine that Da Treviso might have painted it at his best time. It is not like the beautiful portraits of Edward VI. at Windsor and Petworth, which are exactly such as we