Art: Handy Holbein

For many years at his country home at Lake Hopatcong, N. J. Funnyman Joe Cook has been assembling at great expense safety pins, collar buttons, unset stones, Japanese netsukes, miniature bibles, bathtub faucets, tin soldiers, perfume bottles, ball bearings, for his celebrated collection of objects ”no larger than a man’s hand.” An object which qualified for the Cook collection appeared in New York’s art mart last week, a 16th Century portrait four and one-half inches in diameter. Comedian Cook is an unlikely purchaser, however, for the picture is the only authenticated self-portrait in oils of Hans Holbein the Younger, was last valued at $100,000 and is held for much more than that by the firm of Elkan & Abraham Silberman.

The name Holbein in the Anglo-Saxon world immediately suggests the chunky, bearded younger Hans, favorite portraitist of Henry VIII and immortalizer of Tudor aristocracy. Actually there were four famed German Holbeins: Hans the father, Uncle Sigismund, Brothers Hans and Ambrosius. All of them were famed painters, would have left a deep mark on the history of painting if young Hans had never thought of going to England.

As an apprentice in Basle young Holbein found a friend and patron in the great Theologian Erasmus whom he painted many times. The younger Holbein made a name for himself in Basle. Came the depression of the 1520’s, however, and Erasmus sent him packing off to England with a letter of introduction to Sir Thomas More (Utopia). Holbein’s first series of English portraits were not of court celebrities but of the scholars of More’s circle.

Back in Switzerland in 1528 he swanked it about Basle in furs and velvets, bought a fine house for his wife and family, then returned to England in 1530. As far as is known it was the Tudor tycoon Thomas Cromwell (whose portrait by Holbein now hangs in Manhattan’s Frick Gallery) who first introduced this skillful German to bluff King Hal. Henry took to Holbein immediately, made him his court painter in 1537, trusted him sufficiently to send him to Duren in 1539 to paint a reportorial portrait of Anne of Cleves whom Henry was thinking of making his fourth wife.

In 1542 Hans Holbein took time off from his royal work to find a piece of board no bigger than a man’s hand, paint his own picture on it to send to his family in Basle. Year later he died of the plague in London.

The little self-portrait remained in the Holbein family for generations, was not known to the world of art until 1930 when Art Expert Dr. Paul Ganz cleaned it, published its photograph in a magazine. Since then museums and private collectors in a dozen countries have been anxious for it. The only other absolutely authentic Holbein self-portrait is a watercolor in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.