from the fact that his first-born,
Philip, who was born about 1522, was the model for the Child, and that a
portrait of Elsbeth, his wife, served as a study for the Virgin. This
portrait is an unnamed and unsigned drawing in silver-point and Indian
ink, heightened with touches of red chalk, now in the Louvre Collection.
(Plate 13.)

Illustration: PLATE 13
UNNAMED PORTRAIT-STUDY: NOT CATALOGUED AS HOLBEIN'S
_Silver-point and Indian-ink. Louvre Collection_
_Believed by the writer to be Holbein's drawing of
his wife before her first marriage, and the model
for the Solothurn Madonna_

That this is a portrait of Holbein's wife any careful comparison with
her portrait at Basel must establish. Feature for feature, allowing for
the changes of sufficient years, the two faces are one and the same. The
very line of the shoulder, setting of the head, and even the outline of
the fashion in which the low dress is cut, is alike in both. And equally
unmistakable is the relation between this Louvre drawing and the
Madonna of Solothurn.

Yet I am unable to accept Woltmann's theory that the drawing was made in
1522 "for" the Virgin. He assumes that the lettering which borders the
bodice in this drawing--ALS. IN. ERN. ALS. IN....--and the braids in
which the hair is worn are simply some "fancy" dress. But surely if ever
hair bore the stamp of unstudied, even ugly custom, it does so here.
Then, too, Woltmann himself, as are all who adopt this explanation, is
unable to reconcile the oldest age which can be assigned to this sitter
with the youngest that can be assumed for the Basel painting of 1529
upon a hypothesis of only seven years' interval. Temperament and trouble
can do much in seven years; but not so much as this. I say _temperament_
advisedly; because all the evidence of Holbein's life substantiates
the assertion of Van Mander, who had it from Holbein's own circle of
contemporaries,--that the painter's life was made wretched by her
violent temper. We shall find him far from blameless in later years; but
though it may not excuse him, his unhappy home must largely explain his
alienation.

Yet that it can explain such an alteration as that between the Louvre
drawing and the Basel portrait I do not believe. Nor could I persuade
myself either that any married woman of the sixteenth century wore her
hair in that most exclusive and invariable of Teuton symbols--"maiden"
plaits;--or that any husband ever thought it necessary