to the Mediterranean. Keppel was only twenty-four, and when he went to the Dey of Algiers, that monarch said, "I wonder at the English king's insolence in sending me such a foolish, beardless boy." Keppel with the dare-devil pluck that distinguished him, replied, "Had my master supposed wisdom to be measured by length of beard, he would have sent a he-goat." After a long life of active service Keppel was in 1778 tried by court-martial on a charge of incompetence or cowardice; but he was acquitted, amidst great popular rejoicings, and declared by the court to have acted as "a judicious, brave, and experienced officer." In gratitude for the professional assistance he received from Dunning, Erskine, and Lee (who were his counsel), and the sympathy given him by Burke, Keppel had four portraits of himself painted by Reynolds to present to his four friends. This portrait, painted in 1780, is presumably one of them. Keppel was made a peer in 1782 and died in 1786.

887. DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A. (1723-1792). See under 111, p. 399.

"The memory of other authors," says Macaulay, "is kept alive by their works. But the memory of Johnson keeps many of his works alive. The old philosopher is still among us, in the brown coat and the metal buttons"-thanks chiefly to Boswell, but not a little to his other good friend Reynolds. Johnson had his portrait taken many times. He condemned the reluctance to sit for a picture as an "anfractuosity of the human mind." Reynolds alone painted him four times, two of the four pictures being undertaken at Mr. Thrale's request. In the first of these two, Sir Joshua painted him holding a manuscript near his face—a reference to his short-sightedness. which Johnson did not like. "It is not friendly," he said, "to hand down to posterity the imperfections of any man." A few years later Sir Joshua painted another portrait of him for Mr. Thrale. This is the one now before us, and as it was accomplished without any bickerings we may take it as "the author's own portrait." It was painted in 1772, when Johnson was sixty-three, and "at the zenith of his fame,"—when Reynolds was forty-nine, and at the best of his powers. There can be no question of the likeness. The importance of truth and baseness of falsehood were inculcated, Sir Joshua once said, more by Johnson's example than by precept, and all who were of the Johnsonian school were remarkable for a love of truth and

accuracy. Here then is a truthful portrait of Johnson's “large, robust, and unwieldy person"—his countenance "naturally of the cast of an ancient statue, but somewhat disfigured by the scars of St. Vitus's dance." But Reynolds has here handed him down to posterity with his imperfections suggested rather than expressed. The convulsive motions are subdued, the deafness and blindness are hinted at only in the contraction of the face. In his clothes, too, Johnson is here made to figure, out of compliment to the Thrales, in his “Sunday best,”—his coat not uncleanly, his wig fresh powdered, and his buttons of metal,"Streatham best," one should call it rather, for it was at Mrs. Thrale's suggestion, Boswell tells us, that Johnson got better clothes and "enlivened the dark colour, from which he never deviated, by metal buttons." As for his wig, Mr. Thrale's butler always had a better one ready at Streatham; and as Johnson passed from the drawing-room when dinner was announced, the servant would remove the ordinary wig and replace it with the newer one. Mr. Thrale, it may be interesting to add, paid thirty-five guineas for this portrait. When it changed hands in 1816, it fetched £378. It used to hang in the Portrait Gallery which Mrs. Thrale described in a rhyming catalogueGigantic in knowledge, in virtue, in strength,

678.

With Johnson our company closes at length;...

To his comrades contemptuous we see him look down
On their wit and their worth with a general frown.

STUDY FOR A PORTRAIT.

T. Gainsborough, R.A. (1727-1785). See under 760, p. 396. The finished picture, for which this is a study, was a fulllength portrait of Mr. Abel Moysey (he was afterwards a Welsh judge, and deputy-king's-remembrancer), when a young man. It was done no doubt during Gainsborough's Bath period, for which town Mr. Moysey was at one time M.P. The tinge of melancholy noticeable in so many of Gainsborough's portraits is just perceptible here, where the young man leans his head on his hand and seems to look forward into the future.

891. PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A. (1723–1792).
See under 111, p. 399.

A duplicate of this picture, known as the "Hon. Mrs. Musters and Son," is at Colwick Hall, Notts, the residence of

the Musters family. "The present beauty,” wrote Miss Burney in 1779, "is a Mrs. Musters, an exceeding pretty woman, who is the reigning toast of the season." A portrait of the same lady without the child was engraved in 1825, from a picture at Holland House, and erroneously described as Mrs. C. J. Fox.

Lent by the Dilettanti Society.

PORTRAITS OF MEMBERS OF THE DILETTANTI

SOCIETY.

Sir Joshua Reynolds P.R.A. (1723-1792).
See under 111, p. 399.

In 1734 some gentlemen who had travelled in Italy, desirous of encouraging at home a taste for those objects which had contributed so much to their entertainment abroad, formed themselves into a society under the name of The Dilettanti, and agreed upon such resolutions as they thought necessary to keep up the spirit of the scheme." The name "Dilettante has fallen into disrepute since the Society was founded, and come to mean little more than a trifler. But these Dilettanti were amateurs and connoisseurs in the old sense of both terms; men, that is to say, who loved the arts and knew about them, and had in some ways serious purpose in promoting them. They established art-studentships, and it was largely through their influence and patronage that the Royal Academy came to be founded. They sent out archæological expeditions and undertook the publication of learned works. Thus in 1775-1776 —a year before these portraits were painted-the Society published some Travels in Asia Minor and in Greece, undertaken by Dr. Chandler at a cost to them of £2500. For "dilettanti" of a less serious kind Reynolds had scant courtesy

When they talk'd of their Raffaelles, Correggios, and stuff,
He shifted his trumpet, and only took snuff.

But he was painter to this Dilettanti Society, and his two portraits of its members in this room prove his sympathy with their characters and objects. The way in which the Society raised funds for its costly undertakings shows the good-fellowship that prevailed among its members. There were ordinary subscriptions and also fines paid by members "on increase of income by inheritance, legacy, marriage, or preferment." At the time when these portraits were taken the Society had

rooms at the "Star and Garter" in Pall Mall, and it is at one of its meetings there, held to examine curiosities (gems, they seem in this case to be), and discuss points of connoisseurship, that we must suppose the scene before us to be laid. The members represented are (beginning with the head lowest on the left): (1) Lord Mulgrave, a naval officer, who in 1773 had published an account of his voyage to discover the North-West Passage; (2) above him, Lord Dundas; (3) lower down again, the Earl of Seaforth; (4) above him, Charles Francis Greville, Esq., M.P.; (5) a little higher again, John Charles Crowle, Esq., Secretary to the Society at the time; (6) below him, the Duke of Leeds; and (7) to the extreme right, Sir Joseph Banks, elected President of the Royal Society in 1777. A year later he was elected a member of "the club," in which connection Johnson speaks of him as "Banks the traveller, a very honourable accession." He had accompanied Captain Cook on his first voyage round the world, as naturalist; and had subsequently equipped a vessel at his own expense to explore Iceland. He is further entitled to grateful memory as having bequeathed his library and collections to the British Museum.

889. HIS OWN PORTRAIT.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A. (1723–1792).

See under 111, p. 399, and 306, p. 414.

307. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A. (1723–1792).
See under III, p. 399.

Child of the pure unclouded brow.

...

In no respect is the continuity of Christian art so remarkable as in the beautiful representation of children. It is “a singular defect in Greek art, that it never gives you any conception of Greek children. . . . But from the moment when the spirit of Christianity had been entirely interpreted to the Western races, the sanctity of womanhood in the Madonna, and the sanctity of childhood in unity with that of Christ, became the light of every honest hearth, and the joy of every pure and chastened soul; . . and at last in the child-angels of Luca, Mino of Fesole, Luini, Angelico, Perugino, and the first days of Raphael, it expressed itself as the one pure and

...

sacred passion which protected Christendom from the ruin of the Renaissance. Nor has it since failed; and whatever disgrace or blame obscured the conception of the later Flemish and incipient English schools, the children, whether in the pictures of Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, or Sir Joshua, were always beautiful. An extremely dark period indeed follows, . . . [but again there] rises round us, Heaven be praised,”—in the illustrations of Kate Greenaway and the pictures of Millais, recollections many of them of Sir Joshua,-"the protest and the power of Christianity, restoring the fields of the quiet earth to the steps of her infancy" (Art of England, pp. 137, 138). Another characteristic of English art, distinguishing it from classical, may be noticed in this picture: the spirit is studied rather than the flesh, the face rather than the body. "Would you really," Mr. Ruskin asks the classicists, "insist on having her white frock taken off the 'Age of Innocence'; . . . and on Lord Heathfield's (111) parting,—I dare not suggest, with his regimentals, but his Order of the Bath, or what else? ... I feel confident in your general admission that the charm of all these pictures is in great degree dependent on toilette; that the fond and graceful flatteries of each master do in no small measure consist in his management of frillings and trimmings, cuffs and collarettes; and on beautiful flingings or fastenings of investiture, which can only here and there be called a drapery, but insists on the perfectness of the forms it conceals, and deepens their harmony by its contradiction. And although now and then, when great ladies wish to be painted as sibyls or goddesses, Sir Joshua does his best to bethink himself of Michael Angelo, and Guido, and the Lightnings, and the Auroras, and all the rest of it,—you will, I think, admit that the culminating sweetness and rightness of him are in some little Lady So-and-so, with round hat and strong shoes" (Art of England, pp. 85-87). In place of the strong shoes we have, however, here, two pretty "feet beneath her petticoat, Like little mice stealing out.”

79. THE GRACES DECORATING A STATUE OF

HYMEN.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A. (1723–1792).

See under 111, p. 399.

A fancy portrait of the three beautiful daughters of Sir William Montgomery. The Hon. Mrs. Gardner, mother of