We owe a great deal to Holbein, because he was one of the few great painters of the sixteenth century who pictured the commercial age that others had held in contempt. He seems to have seen that Europe had reached the parting of the ways, and that war was no longer to stand as the greatest interest of national life. To realise how the temper of the world has changed, we need do no more than remember that if the sword is drawn in the twentieth century it is in the service of commerce.
The Renaissance that worked so many wonders in Italy opened Holbein's eyes and broadened his point of view, but after the first few years he turned aside from the Italian influence and looked upon the life around him with eyes that had been aided rather than blinded by the bright light that shone over Milan, Florence, and Venice. He was a realist with an exquisite sense of proportion, and a definite certainty of intention and expression, that kept him from playing tricks with his art. As great opportunities came to him, he took such complete advantage of them that to-day we may turn to his work and read in it the history of his own fascinating times. He has left us a gallery of the people who ruled a considerable section of middle and western Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the near East was still untouched by Christian civilisation, and few artists looked beyond the Adriatic for sitters or for patronage.
No small part of the Tudor period lives again under Holbein's hand. He gives us the vivid and enduring impression of an age that had found itself, and his subjects walk with fact, just as the creations of his great contemporary Albert Dürer had walked with fancy. As he saw them so he portrayed them, and history brings no charge of flattery against him save in the case of Anne of Cleves, whose portrait he painted for King Henry VIII. before that much married monarch had seen her. Here he is said to have been guilty of flattery, but it was generally believed at the time that Thomas Cromwell, who was his patron and had commissioned the portrait, was responsible for it. The fact that King Henry himself accepted this view, and that Cromwell suffered for it, suggests that there must be no little foundation for the story, though the king certainly understood the worth of a great artist too well to quarrel with him.