When these two works appeared at Lyons, Holbein had been for many years a resident at the English court, where he painted that series of portraits which remains unsurpassed as a gallery of typical English men and women represented by an artist capable of revealing character as well as of portraying looks. In these later years of his life he busied himself but little with designing for woodcuts, but he did not entirely neglect the art, and was, without doubt, of great service in spreading a taste for it in England, and in improving its practice there. The English printers imported their best woodcuts, and probably wood-engraving was hardly a recognized English art before Holbein’s day. The great titlepage which he designed for Coverdale’s Bible in 1535 was apparently cut by some Swiss engraver, as were some other similar works; but a few designs, which Holbein seems to have drawn so as to require the least possible skill in the engraver to reproduce them, were apparently executed in England. They were produced when England was separating from Rome, in the time of Cromwell’s power, and are marked by the same satirical spirit as Holbein’s earlier work at Bâsle; the self-righteous Pharisee wears a cowl, the lawyers, who are offended when Christ casts out the devil from the possessed one, have bishops’ mitres; the unfaithful shepherd who flees when the wolf comes is a monk. These cuts, in which Holbein last used his art as a weapon of civilization, mark the close of his practice of it.
In the course of that practice he had not merely found utterance for his genius, but he had shown the entire adequacy of wood-engraving for the purposes of the artist when the laws which spring out of its peculiar nature are most rigidly observed. He had employed it with complete success as a mode of obtaining beautiful architectural design, of depicting charming _genre_ scenes, of attacking abuses by the keenest and most effective irony, of making real for the popular comprehension the solemn and beautiful stories of the Scriptures, and of expressing passionate feeling and profound thought; and he thus exercised upon his own time and upon the future an influence which was perhaps more powerful than that exercised by any contemporary artists. Within the limits of the Dance of Death he had embodied in wood-engraving tragedy and humor, satire and sermon, poetic sentiment, dramatic action, and wise reflection, and he thus gave to that work a special interest for his contemporaries as an expression of the sympathies, efforts, and problems of that time, and an enduring interest for all men as the truest picture of universal human life seen at its most tragic moment through the hollow sockets of Death. He did this without offering violence to the peculiar nature of the art, without wresting it from its appropriate methods or requiring of it any difficult effort; he perceived more clearly than Dürer the essential conditions under which wood-engraving must be practised, and he conformed to them. If he had needed cross-hatching, fine and delicate lines, harmonies of tone, and soft transitions of light, he would have had recourse to copperplate; but not finding them necessary, he contented himself with the bold outlines, easily cut and easily printed, which were the peculiar province of wood-engraving, and by means of them created works which not only made wood-engraving illustrious, but rank with the high achievements and valuable legacies of the other arts of design. Holbein was one of the great geniuses of the race, and he put into his works the fire and wisdom of genius; but, independently of what his works contain, and merely as illustrations of artistic methods, they show for the first time an artist perceiving and choosing to obey the simple laws of the art, and exhibiting its compass and capacity, its wealth and utility, within the sphere of those laws. This thorough understanding and rational practice of the art, in connection with his intellectual and artistic powers, made Holbein the most perfect master who has ever left works in wood-engraving, and give his works the utmost value both as forms of art and as embodiments of imagination and thought.