Opie, "The Cornish Wonder" 299 "Ah! you may go back now, you have no chance here. There is such a young man come out of Cornwall!" "Good! Sir Joshua, what is he like?" "I was ready to sink into the earth," adds poor Northcote, who was quite conscious of his own limitations, and began to fear that all his pains had been taken, all his money spent to no avail. This fear of rivalry did not prevent him, however, later on, from doing full justice to the powerful art of his young competitor. Here we find Reynolds striking the right note, and drawing the parallel with Caravaggio, not with Rembrandt, whom our master, his admirer and imitator, was bound to understand better than the dilettanti who pronounced his name in connection with the new chiaroscurist. Opie's first great vogue was obtained through the commission given to him to paint old Mrs Delany, the favourite of King George III. and his consort, and their close companion at Windsor. It was through Mrs Boscawen, on the premature death of whose son Wolcott had written a touching elegy-or, at any rate, an elegy which she found touching-that Opie was selected to paint the aged lady who was, as it were, a link between the poets and wits of the earlier half of the century, whom she had known, and the Blue circle, by the members of which she was surrounded in its concluding years. The portrait, which, notwithstanding a certain Ribera-like aspect, hardly justifies the reputation that it obtained at the time of its production, remained for a long time in the royal bedchamber at Windsor, and was thence transferred to Hampton Court, where it now remains. Mrs Delany arranged that her young Cornish limner should be presented to Their Majesties, and should submit to them some of his works. Wolcott has described in amusing fashion how he spent half the night preceding the momentous interview in putting his young friend through his paces, and ensuring that the salutes to be made to royalty should be of the indispensable number and quality. We know that the presentation, at which West, in his capacity of artistic friend and confidant of the King, assisted, was a success, and that the royal patron purchased two of Opie's studies. Thereupon commissions to paint members of the royal family, great ladies, and beauties rained in, and the world of fashion, so prompt at that moment to take fire and to exaggerate in the one direction or the other, made up its mind for a short period that it must be painted by Opie, to the temporary eclipse even of the masters of the most assured vogue and position. This is, however, anticipating events a little. CHAPTER IX Portraits of this Time-" Perdita "-William Beckford-Colonel Tarleton“The Fair Greek ”—Sir Joshua's Annotations to Du Fresnoy's "Art of Painting"-Exhibition of 1782—Sir Joshua's Pictures-Gainsborough's "Colonel St Leger," and "Girl with Pigs "-Peter Pindar-Death of Wilson-Fuseli-"Lady Catherine Pelham-Clinton feeding her Chickens "Sir Joshua's Illness-Barry's Pictures at the Society of Arts-His Explanatory Pamphlet-Exhibition of 1783-Influence of Rubens-Mrs Siddons-Her Portrait as the Tragic Muse-Origin of the Pose-Its Place among Sir Joshua's Works-Miss Fanny Kemble-Miss Burney on Mrs Siddons-"The Infant Academy". Portrait of Fox-Gainsborough's Quarrel with the Academy-Exhibition of 1784-Sir Joshua's Seventeen Pictures—"Muscipula ""Countess Spencer and her Child"-Reynolds appointed King's Painter-Dr Johnson's Illness-Italian Journey proposed for himHis Death-Reynolds's Estimate of Johnson. LORD THURLOW, the Chancellor of the Rockingham Administration, had sat to Reynolds in the course of 1781 for the three-quarter length in which he appears seated, in his official robes, with the mace on the table to his right. This now belongs to the Marquis of Bath, and was by him contributed to the Reynolds Exhibition, where it was No. 64. To about this period, also, must belong two brilliant half-lengths, the companion portraits of two lovely sisters, Lady Elizabeth Seymour and the Countess of Lincoln, daughters of Francis, second Marquis of Hertford, which are at Manchester House, and were, by Lady Wallace, contributed to the Old Masters Exhibition of 1893. Here, though the modelling is not much more searching than in the picture of the Ladies Waldegrave, the colour shows almost intact that melting splendour, that homogeneous richness which he sacrificed so much to obtain. In these and in some other instances he did obtain what he sought for so completely, and with so unusual a permanence, that we must try to forgive him-if many of his unfortunate sitters very naturally could not-that dangerous restlessness and tentativeness in technique of which his works contain so many and such disastrous examples. Another lovely and unusually well-preserved piece of colour is the portrait of the Countess of Harcourt (exhibited at the British Institution in 1813, and engraved by S. W. Reynolds), which has recently reappeared after a long seclusion. The young and blooming lady, with her hair unpowdered and lightly veiled with an apology for a scarf, sits under a tree in a park, dreamily gazing upwards. Her beauty is of that impersonal and consequently cold type which is not unusual in Sir Joshua's presentments of female loveliness, and in contemplating it one understands the not infrequent complaints of his sitters, that there is more of pictorial charm than of truth to nature in their portraits. The flesh-tints of the face and arms are seen in almost unimpaired beauty and freshness, and are well set-off by the dress, the hue of which is that favourite orange-tawny, a richer variation of which is seen in the "Lady Cockburn," a deeper in the "Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse." In the beginning of 1782, the beautiful, ill-starred "Perdita," otherwise Mrs Mary Robinson, sat to Sir Joshua for the well-known half-length in which she appears with her hair powdered, wearing a black dress, a white stomacher, a glare, black hat with feathers, and a black band round the neck. The Prince of Wales's fair and much pitied victim William Beckford 303 had then already left the stage, and her subsequent liaison with her royal lover had also for some months ceased to exist; but if the portrait did not unduly flatter-and in this case we have evidence that it did not-she was still in the flower of her youth and loveliness. Sir Joshua painted at least one other portrait of her; besides which, of this same picture, more than one repetition exists. The original-glowing, and somewhat tawny in harmony, and belonging to the category of the master's better preserved canvases—was last seen in public at the Guelph Exhibition, to which it was contributed by the Duchess of St Albans. A still more interesting sitter was William Beckford, then a very young man, in the first bloom of manhood, and only later on to develop into the literary recluse whose eccentricities and deliberate waste of the rarest natural gifts, whose strange, semi-oriental mode of life amid the mysterious splendours of Fonthill, caused the most sinister legends to accumulate round his name. Educated, like a little sovereign or demi-god, in complete isolation, and without the wholesome discipline of a public school, he had in his boyhood received musical instruction from Mozart, he had even been noticed by Chatham. At the age of seventeen, he had given rein to the wilfulness of his talent by writing a burlesque History of Extraordinary Painters, intended as a satire on the style of the Vies des Peintres flamands. A delightful mixture of boyish fun and true humour was shown in his mystifications of the housekeeper at Fonthill, whom he incited, when going her rounds with visitors to exhibit her master's pictures as by "Watersouchy," "Og of Basan," etc. When he sat to Reynolds, Beckford, young as he was, had already accomplished the literary feat which remained, after all, his greatest claim to distinction. He |