ustry was used to
acquire a comfortable home which remained the property of his wife. And
the inventory of its contents at Elsbeth's death, some six years after
Holbein's death, proves that this home was to the full as well furnished
and comfortable as was usual with people of similar condition.

In the summer of 1528 the painter bade farewell for ever to Sir Thomas
More's gracious Chelsea home. He took with him the pen-and-ink sketch
for a large picture of More in the midst of his family, which has been
already referred to. This was for Erasmus, who had temporarily abandoned
Basel,--now so utterly unlike the Basel of former years,--and had sought
the more sympathetic atmosphere of Freiburg. Bonifacius Amerbach, from
the same causes, was here with Erasmus for some time. So that something
like the old Froben days must have seemed still about them as the three
friends sat together and talked of all that had come and gone.

But by the latter part of August Holbein was back in that now
sadly-altered Basel whence his best friends were reft by trouble or
death. And on the 29th of August, 1528, he bought the house next to
Froben's _Buchhaus_, the deed attesting that he did so in person, in
company with Elsbeth. The price, 300 guldens or florins, was by no means
the small one it now seems, nor could the painter pay the whole sum at
once. He paid down one-third, and secured the rest by a mortgage. The
site of this house is now occupied by 22 St. Johann Vorstadt. Three
years later, March 28th, 1531, Holbein bought out a disagreeable
neighbour; and thus added to his two-storied house overlooking the
Rhine the little one-storied cottage which cost him only seventy
guldens. The factory at No. 20 now partially covers this latter site.
Fifty years ago both of the original houses were still standing; quaint,
crumbling, affecting monuments of days when Holbein's voice and
Holbein's step rang through their rooms, when Frau Elsbeth swept and
garnished them; and when four children added their links to the chain of
a marriage which Holbein was now manfully trying to make the best of.

It must have been in the year after the purchase of the larger house
that he painted the group of his wife and the two children she had then
borne him. This life-size group, done in oils on paper, is now in the
Basel Museum (Plate 25). The stoical sincerity with which they are
represented, and the hard outline produced by cutting out the work to
mount it on