530 came a commission for the painter's last great work in
Basel. This was the long-delayed order for the decoration of that vacant
wall in the Council Hall, which adjoined the house _zum Hasen_.

Oddly enough, this commission also came officially through a
burgomaster, Jacob Meyer. But the Meyer of 1530, Meyer "of-the-Stag"
(_zum Hirten_), had neither blood nor sentiments in common with the
Meyer under whom Holbein had done his first work in the Rathaus. Each
headed a party at deadly issue. For the past year Meyer-of-the-Hare had
vainly tried to turn back the clock or to stay the iconoclastic fury
of the hour. Religious fanaticism had wrecked him as well as every
beautiful piece of art on which it could lay its hands. And now at last
it mattered nothing any more so far as he was concerned. The dreadful
harvests that had brought virtual famine, the earthquake shocks which
had unsettled many a mental as well as material foundation, the flooding
devastations of the Birsig, the rage of Canton against Canton, the Civil
War ready to begin, Pope or Luther come by his own,--it was all one at
last to Meyer zum Hasen, who died just as his protege of earlier years
was commissioned to paint the blank wall.

But something of his spirit, something of what he himself had been
preaching to Basel in warning and threat for years, seems to have passed
on into the pictures Holbein set before the Council. The paintings,
alas! are no more. But a fragment or two and the drawings for them show
how truly grand the two works were which Holbein had probably already
intended should be his swan-song as Holbein _Basiliensis_. He chose for
his subjects Rehoboam's answer to the suffering Israelites: "My little
finger shall be thicker than my father's loins; my father hath chastised
you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions"; and Samuel
prophesying to Saul how dearly he shall learn that "Rebellion is as the
sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness as an iniquity and idolatry."

Both subjects are treated in the Great manner. Rehoboam, leaning forward
from his throned seat with flashing eyes, and his little finger seeming
actually to quiver in the air, is wonderfully conceived. But the meeting
of Samuel and Saul (Plate 26) most splendidly demonstrates how far
Holbein towered above mere portraiture when he had the opportunity. To
picture this drawing in all the beauty of colour is to realise what we
have lost, and what his just fame has lost, wi