Holbein and Henry James

‘The Ambassadors’ (1533)

On any day​ of the week, you will find a sizeable crowd at the National Gallery standing in front of the painting now known as The Ambassadors: Hans Holbein’s life-sized double portrait of 1533 depicting Jean de Dinteville, the French ambassador in England, and his friend and fellow humanist Georges de Selve, bishop of Lavaur, who passed through London in the spring of 1533, around the time of Anne Boleyn’s coronation. Selve was later appointed French ambassador in Venice – hence the title by which the painting has come to be known.

Dinteville and Selve are depicted with mathematical and scientific instruments; globes (one celestial, one terrestrial); books (including a German hymnal with mismatched pages); and musical instruments (including a lute with a broken string). There is, too, a front-and-centre display of anamorphosis. What appears, when viewed head on, to be a large, greyish-white streak between the men’s feet resolves, when viewed from the side, into a skull which seems to project from the wooden panel. Although most of Holbein’s surviving paintings are not signed, this one is. On the floor behind and to the left of Dinteville, Holbein has inscribed ‘Ioannes Holbein pingebat. 1533’: an indication, perhaps, that he was particularly proud of this ambitious work.

More has probably been written about The Ambassadors than about any other work by Holbein. Is the painting a commentary on the religious divisions threatening to rip apart Christendom in the early 1530s? A reminder of the frailty of life and the inevitability of death? An essay on the conflict between secular and sacred authorities? A celebration of friendship in the classical sense of the friend as a second self? A memorial to the Nuremberg Treaty of 1532, by which Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, legally acknowledged the existence of Protestantism for the first time? A commemoration of Anne Boleyn’s coronation in Westminster Abbey on 1 June 1533?

Acquired by the National Gallery in 1890 from the 5th Earl of Radnor’s collection (along with two other paintings) for the enormous sum of £55,000, the work – its sitters’ identities then uncertain – first went on display in September 1890, before being removed in December for cleaning and restoration. Several months later, towards the end of the summer of 1891, the Longford Castle Holbein – as the Victorians usually referred to it – was returned to public display. A crucifix previously obscured by varnish was now visible in the painting’s upper left corner, peeking out from behind the green curtain. Newly revealed, too, were the formerly illegible words, in German, on the pages of the open hymnal.

It requires an effort today – when high-resolution, colour images of famous artworks are readily available at the click of a mouse – to imagine the excitement with which these events were greeted. Members of the public flocked to Trafalgar Square to see the painting, both before and after its cleaning and restoration, and to share their thoughts on it, typically via the letters pages of the Times. In one, printed on 7 October 1890, the architect and furniture designer Charles Locke Eastlake (nephew and namesake of the National Gallery’s first director) suggested that the anamorphic skull might be a coded reference to Thomas Cranmer (crânemère), who was appointed archbishop of Canterbury in the run-up to Anne Boleyn’s coronation. In a letter printed on 20 October 1890, John Marshall RA proposed an alternative theory: that the skull constituted ‘a punning signature of the great artist’, ‘hohl’ and ‘bein’ being the German (loosely translated) for ‘hollow bone’.

There were debates, too, about the identities and nationalities of the sitters. A late 18th-century engraving of the painting – produced at the behest of the Parisian art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, who briefly owned the work – had described the sitters as ambassadors. When, in 1873, the 4th Earl of Radnor lent the painting to the Royal Academy for that year’s Winter Exhibition, it was tentatively referred to in the accompanying catalogue as ‘The Two Ambassadors’, with an explanatory note that the sitters were ‘believed to be … Sir Thomas Wyatt … and his Secretary’. Proposed pairings mooted on the letters pages of the Times in the early 1890s, some of which embraced the ambassadorial theme, included Wyatt and the French poet Nicholas Bourbon; Otto Henry, Count Palatine, and his brother Philipp; George Boleyn, 2nd Viscount Rochford, and William Paget, 1st Baron Paget; and Richard Pate and Hugh Askew. This last lent itself to yet another interpretation of the anamorphic skull: that it was a visual pun on the sitters’ combined surnames (‘Pate Askew’). One member of the public optimistically suggested that either of the men depicted could be Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano, despite the fact that, by 1533, Castiglione had been dead for four years.

The mystery was resolved on 7 December 1895, when Mary F.S. Hervey – the only woman to record her thoughts on the matter – asserted, also in a letter to the Times, that she had found ‘the Solution’ in a mid-17th-century inventory. This document, as Hervey explained, contained ‘the whole history of the picture during the first 120 years of its existence’, including the identification of the sitters as Dinteville (in whose family château at Polisy – shown on the terrestrial globe – the painting had been recorded since the 16th century) and Selve. Hervey expanded her findings into a bestselling book, Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors’: The Picture and the Men – An Historical Study (1900), which remains an indispensable resource.

Henry James was among the many who followed these developments with interest. He had long been an admirer of Holbein’s portraits. Reviewing an exhibition of John Singleton Copley’s portraits in the Nation in 1875, he had noted that Copley was ‘by no means a Holbein’, who was the ‘supreme genius’ in this sphere. Four years later, writing about the Royal Academy’s Winter Exhibition of 1879, James hailed the 29 ‘magnificent … heads in chalk’ lent by Queen Victoria as ‘the most striking feature of the exhibition’, noting that Holbein’s portraits, whether drawn or painted, possessed ‘a strong and incorruptible reality … of the literal facts and idiosyncrasies of the face … that has never been surpassed’.

James was an admirer, too, of the National Gallery. In a review of its ‘noble collection’ in 1877, he argued that, though the rooms were ‘perhaps a trifle less lofty and less splendid’ than the Louvre’s, nonetheless ‘the pictures appear to as great an advantage as the London daylight allows.’ Decades later, in The Middle Years, he recalled with pleasure past visits to the gallery, including the thrill of once finding himself standing next to Swinburne while admiring a Titian. It also appears as a key location in two of his novels. In What Maisie Knew (1897), young Maisie Farange and her stepfather, Sir Claude, seek shelter from the rain among the Italian Renaissance Madonnas, images (in Sir Claude’s view) full of ‘silly superstition’. In The Wings of the Dove (1902), the mortally ill heiress Milly Theale, pausing to rest in the Dutch and Flemish masters’ room, spies Merton Densher and Kate Croy – thereby realising that, contrary to what she has been led to believe, they are well-acquainted. The same room features as a location in James’s short story ‘Mora Montravers’.

It’s perhaps not surprising that, in casting about for a title for The Ambassadors (1903), James seems to have taken inspiration from Holbein’s painting, which had been much in the news during the years his novel was in gestation. As is clear from James’s notebooks, the rough idea for the story came to him in the autumn of 1895. The bulk of the writing, however, took place in a concentrated burst between the autumn of 1900 and the summer of 1901. In other words, he was working on the novel – which, in many ways, is a celebration of France and all things French – during a period when, thanks to the researches of Mary F.S. Hervey, the numerous French connections that found expression in Holbein’s magnificent double portrait were being brought to light.

‘Christ­ina of Denmark’ (1538).

The Ambassadors was not the only painting by Holbein in the National Gallery to have captured the imagination of James and the British public at the turn of the 20th century. Christina of Denmark, painted in 1538, is a product of Henry VIII’s search for a fourth queen following Jane Seymour’s death in the autumn of 1537. To take Christina’s likeness, Holbein travelled to Brussels, where he was granted a three-hour sitting. Presumably, Holbein made multiple ad vivum drawings of Christina on the spot, which he worked up into a painting on his return to England. The finished product is Holbein’s only extant life-sized, full-length portrait of a woman.

Christina of Denmark had been lent to the Royal Academy by the 15th Duke of Norfolk for its Winter Exhibition of 1880. When the exhibition closed, the trustees of the National Gallery – aware that building works were planned at Arundel Castle and conscious that the gallery lacked any works by Holbein – arranged to borrow the painting, which was placed on display in the Dutch and Flemish masters’ room. (The gallery did not have a room dedicated to the German schools until 1898.) What was intended as a temporary loan turned into something more long-term. In 1890, Christina was joined by The Ambassadors and, as the years passed, most visitors would have assumed that both works were owned by the gallery.

It thus came as a shock to the museum-going public when, in late April 1909, the duke accepted an offer of £61,000 from Colnaghi & Co. art dealers for Christina, on the understanding that the trustees of the gallery would have until the end of the month (just nine days) to raise an equivalent sum if they were to keep it. When they failed to do so, it was promptly offered to Henry Clay Frick for £72,000, the understanding this time being that the trustees would have a month to raise matching funds. A nationwide appeal was launched by the recently founded National Art Collections Fund and aesthetes began holding daily vigils in Trafalgar Square.

As with the ‘Longford Castle Holbein’ in the early 1890s, the ‘Norfolk Holbein’ was rarely out of the news in the spring of 1909. On 3 May 1909, the painter Philip Burne-Jones noted in a letter to the Times that if the painting should ‘find a home in America … its days are practically numbered … No painting can survive many years in the overheated atmosphere of American rooms or galleries.’ The next day the Daily Graphic described the prospect of its loss as the source of a collective ‘condition of mourning’. On 5 May 1909, Lionel Cust, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, wrote in the Times: ‘There is an element of tragedy in this incident, coupled with a deep sense of humiliation.’ A week later, Punch ran a cartoon depicting Uncle Sam trying to wrench Christina from her frame beneath a caption reading: ‘HANS ACROSS THE SEA?’

Not all were in favour of saving Christina for the nation. The Sheffield Independent printed a series of unflattering comments from visitors who had been underwhelmed by the painting: one man briskly dismissed Holbein’s portrait as ‘an old puddin’-face’. Another letter-writer to the Times argued that the money being raised for Christina would be better spent preserving the country’s cathedrals: ‘The Holbein, though lost to us, would not be lost to the world; but a cathedral fallen would never be restored.’ Vanity Fair noted that, as Britons could see live duchesses for free, ‘Why, then, pay £72,000 to see dead duchesses?’

In the end, the picture was secured for the National Gallery at the eleventh hour by an anonymous donation of £40,000 from someone who wished only to be known as ‘a patriotic lady’. The Westminster Gazette duly ran a cartoon depicting Christina and John Bull embracing under the heading ‘Something has turned up.’ Unlike his friends John Singer Sargent and Edmund Gosse, James does not seem to have contributed to the fund to save the painting. But he followed events closely. In a letter to Gosse of 4 June 1909, he wrote: ‘The Holbein Duchess has been saved – by a veiled lady who has bought her off for £40,000. Can you lift the veil?’ Gosse could not. Indeed, to this day, the woman’s identity remains uncertain – though Lady Tate, Lady Harriet Wantage, the Countess of Carlisle and the Duchess of Marlborough (the American-born heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt) were among those rumoured to have come to Christina’s aid.

The tussle formed the basis for the last novel James completed before his death, The Outcry (1911). A comedy of manners, it depicts the clash between New World money and Old World values when a wealthy American art collector, Breckenridge Bender (‘bender’ being 19th-century slang for a sixpence), attempts to buy a prized Old Master from an English nobleman, Lord Theign, who is asset-rich but cash-poor. Originally conceived as a three-act play, it was recast as a novel after London’s theatres were shut for a period of mourning following the death of Edward VII in May 1910. Although Holbein is never mentioned by name, the novel’s plot is clearly based on the outcry sparked by the Duke of Norfolk’s decision to sell Christina and Frick’s determination to acquire her.

Frick was already in possession of works by Titian, Rembrandt and Vermeer, among other Old Masters. But he seems to have felt that he would never be viewed as a collector of the first rank until he had acquired at least one Holbein. This was something Frick’s friend and rival collector Isabella Stewart Gardner of Boston had already done. Her purchase in 1899 of Holbein’s Sir William Butts and Lady Butts from Colnaghi & Co. probably inspired James’s short story ‘The Beldonald Holbein’, in which the titular portrait, ‘the wonderful sharp old face so extraordinarily, consummately drawn’, is ‘banished’ from London to find itself in a ‘minor American city’.

In the end, Frick acquired not one but two paintings by Holbein. Apparently spurred on by the loss of Christina, he intensified his efforts and in 1912 – acting, in part, on advice from Roger Fry – acquired a portrait of Sir Thomas More from Edward Huth of the Huth family of merchant bankers. This was followed, in 1915, by a painting of Thomas Cromwell which had belonged to the earls of Caledon. Neither purchase caused a national outcry in the way that Frick’s attempt to buy Christina had done, perhaps because the flow of art from the Old World to the New had become such a familiar story. Frick hung the two portraits in pride of place on either side of the fireplace in the Living Hall of his Fifth Avenue mansion, where they remain today.