ABSTRACT
Holbein's career took him to London, where he painted his famous oils of the ambassadors, the German merchant Georg Gisze and the court of Henry VIII. In the Holbein monograph, Ford commented repeatedly on the ugliness of Holbein's English sitters and his irregular, adulterous lifestyle about which so little was known. Holbein's painting of Georg Gisze, the German merchant of the London steel yard, renders the sitter through the accumulation of professional paraphernalia and symbolic items whose meaning now remains obscure. Just as Holbein, a German immigrant, required the ostentatious objects surrounding his sitters to make us see the underlying truth of their vacuity, Ford required the tricky' German setting to convince us of his vision of pathological Anglo-Saxons. The spa as a socio-medical institution is a symptomatic locus in The Good Soldier. The social aspects of spa life were healthy mental influences' and clearly regarded as beneficial.
