escaped from the clutches
of one suit for debt after another in order to tumble into some fresh
disaster of the sort, until his own brother Sigmund appears among his
exasperated creditors. After 1524 Hans Holbein the Elder vanishes from
the records. Probably, therefore, it was at about this date that he
paid,--Heaven and himself only knowing how willingly,--the one debt
which every man pays at the last.

At all events his sons did leave Augsburg about 1514; or, at any rate,
Hans did, since there is a naive little Virgin and Child in the Basel
Museum, dated 1514, which must have been painted in the neighbourhood of
Constance in this year,--probably for the village church where it was
discovered. As everything points to the conclusion that Holbein was born
in 1497, he would have been some seventeen years old at this time, and
"Prosy" eighteen or nineteen. Substantially, therefore, they must have
looked pretty much as in the drawing which their father had made of them
three years before; that precious drawing in silver-point which is now
in the Berlin Collection (Plate 2). Over the elder, still with the curly
locks of the group in the "St. Paul Basilica," is written _Prosy_; over
the younger, _Hanns_. The age of the latter, fourteen, may still be
deciphered above his portrait, but that of Ambrose has quite vanished.
Between the two is the family name, written in Augsburg fashion,
Holbain. At the top of the sheet stands the year of the drawing, almost
illegible, but believed to be 1511.

Illustration: PLATE 2

"PROSY" AND "HANNS" _HOLBAIN_
[_Drawn by their father, Hans Holbein the elder_]
_Silver-point. Berlin Cabinet_

Of the elder brother all that is certainly known may be said here once
for all. In 1517 he entered the Painters' Guild at Basel, where he is
called "Ambrosius Holbein, citizen of Augsburg." He made a number of
designs for wood-engraving, title-pages, and ornaments, for the printers
of Basel--all of fair merit. He may also have worked in the studio of
Hans Herbster, a Basel painter of considerable note. Herbster's portrait
in oils, long held to be a fine work of the younger brother,--now that
it has passed from the Earl of Northbrook's collection to that of the
Basel Museum, is attributed to Ambrose Holbein. But little else is known
of him; and after 1519, as has been said, the absence of any record of
him among the living suggests that he died in that year.

In the late summer of 1515 came that mo