Note (return) — Chapter XI

At Basle Holbein married, while still a young man. The presumption that the painter's marriage, like that of his countryman, Albert Dürer, was unhappy, has rested on the foundation that he left his wife and her children behind when he repaired to England, and that although he re-visited Basle, and saw his wife and family, they did not return with him to England. A fancied confirmation to the unhappiness of the marriage is found in the expression of the wife in a portrait which Holbein painted of her and his children when he was at Basle. 'Cross-looking and red-eyed,' one critic calls the unlucky woman; another describes her as 'a plain, coarse-looking, middle-aged woman,' with an expression 'certainly mysterious and unpleasant.' Holbein's latest biographer 36 has proved that the forsaken wife, Elssbeth Schmid, was a widow with one son when Holbein married her, and has conjectured that she was probably not only older than Holbein, but in circumstances which rendered her independent of her husband. So far the critic has done something to clear Hans Holbein from the miserable accusation often brought against him, that he abandoned his wife and children to starve at Basle, while he sunned himself in such court favour as could be found in England. But, indeed, while Hans Holbein may have been honest and humane enough to have been above such base suspicions, there is no trace of him which survives that goes to disprove the probability that he was a self-willed, not over-scrupulous man, if he was also a vigorous and thorough worker.