With the exception of a miniature at Windsor, there is no authentic portrait of _Catherine Howard_, whom the King married as soon as he had divorced the unfortunate Anne; but her uncle, _Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk_, the Lord High Admiral, was painted by him more than once. Holbein had now become the most popular portrait painter of the day, and his commissions were very numerous. It is impossible to give a complete list of them here, but the principal ones will be found in the Appendix.
At Windsor Castle is the magnificent collection of chalk drawings of heads, over eighty in number, which includes portraits of many of the most illustrious people of the day. These were preliminary studies for portraits, and are the finest record we possess of the celebrities of the Tudor period, invaluable both historically and artistically. In them Holbein is seen at his finest as a delineator of character.
In 1542 he began the large painting which was ordered to commemorate the granting of a charter by Henry VIII. to the newly-incorporated Company of Barber Surgeons, which still hangs in the Company’s Hall in London. He did not live to complete it. Some of the heads of the principal physicians he had finished, but the greater part of the picture, including the huge and ugly figure of the King, out of all proportion to the other persons represented, was put in by some other and far inferior hand. At least two of the doctors represented in this work were also painted by him separately, _Dr. John Chambers_ (Vienna) and _Sir William Butts_, as well as the latter’s wife.
Holbein died in the following year, 1543, carried off by the plague, which then raged in London. The exact date of his death is not known, but he made a hasty will on October 7, and on November 29 administration was granted to his old friend Hans of Antwerp, the goldsmith. He was living at the time in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft, where he was rated as a foreigner. He is supposed to have been buried in the Church of St. Katherine Cree, but no record of this has been discovered. His wife died in 1549. His eldest son Philip, “a good, well-behaved lad,” served his apprenticeship in Paris, and finally settled in Augsburg, founding that branch of the family upon which the Emperor Matthias conferred a patent of nobility as the Holbeins of Holbeinsberg. His second son James died as a goldsmith in London, while his daughters married respectable citizens of Basle.