CHAPTER III Marriage of the King, and Coronation Portraits-"Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy"-Other Portraits of Garrick by Reynolds and Gainsborough-Ramsay appointed Painter to the King-Tour in West of England with Dr Johnson-Northcote for the first time meets Reynolds-Exhibition of 1764-"The Club" established-Johnson's Letter to Reynolds on his Illness-Carle Van Loo-Oliver Goldsmith -Edmund Burke-Exhibition of 1765-Lady Sarah Bunbury sacrificing to the Graces-Mythological and Allegorical PortraitureIntimacy with Wilkes-Angelica Kauffmann-Her Career and Relation to Reynolds-Unfortunate Marriage with Horn-Reynolds accused Abroad of Complicity in Plot-Absurdity of the Accusation shown. THE marriage and coronation of young King George, which took place respectively on the 2d and 22d September 1761, gave much occupation to Reynolds as the most fashionable master of the hour, and one, too, who at that point had no serious rivals in his particular line. Lady Elizabeth Keppel, whose simple, reposeful half-length has already been described, was portrayed in all the splendours of her royal bridesmaid's costume, gleaming with white satin and silver, in the act of adorning the obligatory statue of Hymen with heavy wreaths of flowers, which are being handed to her by a negress. This mode of treatment, minus the conventional piece of pseudo-classicism peculiar to the last half of the eighteenth century, is manifestly adapted from Van Dyck, 70 Portraits of Royal Bridesmaids 71 who, more than once, in full-lengths of high-born dames dressed in satin of silvery sheen, has heightened, by the introduction of a negro boy holding flowers, the delicacy of his tints, and the refinement of his sitters. This fulldress and essentially decorative presentment of the illfated Marchioness of Tavistock as she afterwards became is in the collection of the Duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey. Two other youthful beauties among the royal bridesmaids-Lady Caroline Russell and Lady Sarah Lenox (later on again to be presented by the artist as Lady Sarah Bunbury)—were also painted. There was begun in this year the quasi-dramatic group of portraits at Holland House* (collection of the Earl of Ilchester), showing Lady Sarah Lenox leaning from a low window in the Jacobean mansion to take from the hands of Lady Susan Strangways a dove which the latter holds out to her, while the youthful Charles James Fox, with a paper in his hand, urges his cousins to come in to a rehearsal of Jane Shore. Notwithstanding its undoubted freshness and charm, the picture is not exempt from a certain minauderie, to which Reynolds was often to succumb, especially in his portraits of youthful persons and children; and, moreover, the difficulty of combining portraiture with definite dramatic action has not been completely solved. The picture is evidently intended to commemorate the amateur performance of Jane Shore by a company of girls and children, including, as its chief performers, the young people here portrayed, of which Horace Walpole writes with enthusiasm to George Montagu on January 22d, 1761, especially praising the beauty and ingenuousness of Lady Sarah in the title part. * Shown at the Royal Academy Exhibition of Old Masters in 1871. A beautiful and exceptional portrait-study belonging to this period, about which too little has been written and said, is the "Miss Jacobs," which has been seen both at the Old Masters, and at the Guildhall in 1890; being, on the latter occasion, wrongly catalogued as belonging to the year 1791 (in lieu of 1761). The lady, a lovely and ingenuous blonde, who is supposed to have been a singer, appears seated, dressed entirely in pale, sheeny blue, with a single row of pearls as a necklace, and in her lap a delicate bouquet of flowers, just discreetly giving the requisite fillip to the colour-scheme. Here Reynolds has himself successfully infringed his subsequently-enunciated precept, contained in the eighth Discourse to the students of the Royal Academy, delivered December 10th, 1778, and thus worded: : "It ought, in my opinion, to be indispensably observed that the masses of light in a picture be always of a warm, mellow colour; yellow, red, or a yellowish-white; and that the blue, the grey, or the green colours be kept entirely out of these masses, and be used only to support and set off these warm colours." It has been very generally, and on the whole with a great preponderance of probability, assumed that it was to combat or defy this precept that Gainsborough's famous "Blue Boy" was produced; but a little doubt exists about the chronology of this masterpiece, which may, according to some, though not the better, authorities, have been in existence several years before the Discourse was delivered. Should this be assumed to be the case, the usually accepted order would have to be reversed, and we should be compelled, unless we would spoil the legend altogether, to assume that the Discourse was |