This portrait of Sir Henry Wyatt, a bust on panel with green background, was long thought to stand for the painter's friend and patron Sir Thomas More, and it has been left for modern research to discover the mistake. Holbein painted this portrait twice. There is a replica in the National Gallery of Ireland.
If this was his intention, he can at least plead that it was entirely successful. Not only did it delight the magnates of the Steelyard, who showered commissions upon him as long as he could execute them, it carried the story of his fame to the last corner of the earth where the story of a man's achievement can obtain a generous hearing, that is to his own city. Burgomaster Meier zum Hirten, not to be confused with that other Meier who married Dorothea Kannegiesser and looks at us to-day from the walls of the Basle Museum, wrote to Holbein in London inviting him to return, with the promise of a retainer of thirty gulden annually. But the painter had learned that the tender mercies of the inartistic are cruel, and he was now beyond the need for any of the service that Basle could offer.
Of Holbein's work for the Steelyard, the greater part has been lost. It will be remembered that the Guild fell on troublous times in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and its Hall suffered a long period of neglect. We may say that we should not have a very complete knowledge of the artist's output had his sketches been no better preserved than his finished work. We know, too, that the Council of the Steelyard recognised in the painter of George Gisze a man whose attainments covered every field of art; and a year after he had distinguished himself in their service for the first time, he was put in charge of the pageant arranged by the Steelyard in honour of the Coronation of the unfortunate Anne Boleyn. He painted the "Triumph of Riches" and "Triumph of Poverty" for the Steelyard, but nothing remains of these pictures save a sketch for the former that may be studied to-day in Paris.
Whether Holbein's work outside the circle of the merchants was the result of his earlier association, or came to him through the intimate connection between the great guild and a certain section of the aristocracy, is a disputed point; but we incline to the belief that the painter's position was fully recognised, and that if work was rather slow in reaching him from the ranks of the men he had known on the occasion of his first visit, the times were to blame. Statesmen and churchmen had been his patrons, now they were fighting for their lives. But very soon after he had painted the portrait of George Gisze, Holbein gave to the world the famous picture known as "The Ambassadors," now hanging in our National Gallery, and reproduced here. The man on the left is generally held to be Sieur Jean de Dinteville, French Ambassador to the Court of Henry VIII., and his companion is said to be George de Selve, who was French Ambassador to the Court of the great Emperor Charles V.