If we may accept the balance of evidence, Hans Holbein was born in the last years of the fifteenth century in Augsburg, then a city of great importance. The visitor to Bavaria to-day will find few traces of its vanished prosperity, but in the years when Hans Holbein was a little boy Augsburg held merchant princes by the dozen, and men of distinction by the score, and enjoyed the favour of the Emperor Maximilian, himself no mean patron of the arts. In such a city at the beginning of the sixteenth century there would have been a certain community of interest between the leaders of state, commerce, and religion, who, keenly conscious of the honour that had come to Italy through the Revival of Learning and the practice of the arts, would do all that in them lay to devote a part of their wealth and leisure to placing their city in an honourable position. Civic pride was rampant throughout the great cities of Europe in the Middle Ages, and Augsburg was no exception to the rule. Holbein's father, whose work may be studied to great advantage in Berlin, was an artist of repute. He belonged to the Guild of Painters that had been successfully established in the city, and enjoyed the patronage of the leisured classes to an extent that brought a measure of prosperity to all its members. The practice of the arts was comparatively new to Augsburg, and doubtless the story of Italian prosperity had lost nothing on its journey across the Tyrol. The Bavarian city would expect its prosperous Guild to achieve distinction, and was ready and able to respond to progress, so that the conditions were very favourable to endeavour and to success. Every great city sought to achieve renown by raising in its midst, or attracting to its circle, scholars and artists of world-wide repute. Hans Holbein had a double advantage. Not only was the time ripe for his achievements, but the family surroundings were of the kind calculated to develop his powers early. His father, nephew, and brothers were painters, and from his earliest years he would have been brought into intimate touch with the life and work of artists. He would have had access to the hall of the Painters' Guild, where as much as could be secured of the world's fine work was to be seen. The Guild was the centre of a great city's enthusiasms; the work was criticised and studied. Great financiers of Augsburg brought artists and craftsmen from other towns, and it is safe to assume that the best of them would have been found in the hall of the Guild from time to time exhibiting their own work, and telling an interested gathering of the wonders of other cities in days when the journey across the frontiers of one's own country was not to be safely or lightly undertaken. The elder Holbein would have introduced his son into the best artistic circles of his time and place; for although he does not seem to have been the leading artist of his city, he received important commissions from the religious houses, and the collection of sketches in the Berlin National Gallery shows how much the son owed to the father, and what a clever fellow the father was.