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[beginning of page] (12) Extract from Gerald S. Davies' "Hans Holbein the Younger".

     When Holbein painted the author of "Utopia", which, as 

we have said, Holbein had illustrated years before, More was about fifty-one years old. There are two drawings at Windsor, one of which seems to be some years later than the other. The first of the two, which may be considered the original study for the oil portrait in the possession of Mr. Huth, convinces one at the first glance of its lifelike fidelity. The clear grey eye, showing, as Erasmus remarked, that a very small pupil "which in England is accounted to be one of the signs of genius"; the finely-curved brow arch, from under which the glance comes as penetrating and dauntless as of some eagle; the firm line of the mouth, grave set by habit, and yet ready to break into a smile; all this goes together to give us the face of the man in whom and in whose life strength and tenderness, humor and pathos, laughter and tears, lay close together. The light brown hair straggling from beneath the cap, the complexion sallow and almost pallid, agree with what Erasmus tells us. Holbein tells us further, by the redness round the eyes, that the man he was drawing was a student.

      There are many instances in which, as we look from Holbein's

preliminary studies in chalk to his finished oil picture, we find ourselves as fully satisfied with the former as the latter. And this is not always due, though it often is, to the fact that the oil painting has entirely escaped the hand of the restorer, but rather to the fact that Holbein in these studies gives us absolutely all that Art can give or ask.

                                             Chapter XII. p. 118/9. 

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