Hitherto we have travelled far and wide in our search for typical examples of the beautiful in painting.  We went from Flanders to Italy, from Italy to Germany, back to Holland, and thence to Spain.  It is true that we began in England with our first picture, and that we have returned twice, once with Holbein, and again with Van Dyck, both foreign born and trained artists.  We will finish with examples of truly native English art.

In the eighteenth century England for the first time gained a foremost place in painting, though the people of the day scarcely realized that it was so.  Even the poet Gray, writing in 1763, could say: 

Why this nation has made no advance hitherto in painting and sculpture, it is hard to say....  You are generous enough to wish, and sanguine enough to foresee, that art shall one day flourish in England.  I, too, much wish, but can hardly extend my hopes so far.

Yet in 1763 Reynolds was forty years of age and Gainsborough but four years younger.  Hogarth was even sixty-six, and at work upon his last plate.  Although, hitherto, the best painting in England had been done by foreign artists such as Holbein and Van Dyck, yet there had always been Englishmen of praiseworthy talent who had painted pleasing portraits.  Hogarth carried this native tradition to a high point of excellence.  He painted plain, good-natured-looking people in an unaffected and straightforward way.  But he was a humourist in paint, and as great a student of human nature as he was of art.  His insight into character and his great skill with the brush, combined with his sensitiveness to fun, make him in certain respects a unique painter.  In the National Gallery there is a picture of the heads of his six servants in a double row.  They might all be characters from Dickens, so vividly and sympathetically humorous is each.

In his engravings Hogarth satirised the lives of all classes of the society of his day.  When we look at them we live again in eighteenth-century London, and walk in streets known to fame though now destroyed, thronged with men and women, true to life.

As an artist, Hogarth occupies a position between the seventeenth-century Dutch painters of low life and the English painters that succeeded him, who expressed the ideals of a refined society.  His portraits have something of the strength of Rembrandt’s.  His street and tavern scenes rival Jan Steen’s; but behind the mere representation of brutality, vice, crime, and misery we perceive not merely a skilled craftsman but a moral being, whom contact with misery deeply stirs and the sight of wickedness moves to indignation.

After 1720 a succession of distinguished painters were born in England.  Many of them first saw the light in obscure villages in the depths of the country.  Reynolds came from Devonshire, Gainsborough from Suffolk, Romney from the Lake country.

The eighteenth century was a time when politicians and men of letters had the habit of gathering in the coffee-houses of London—­forerunners of the clubs of to-day.  Conversation was valued as one of life’s best enjoyments, and the varied society of actors, authors, and politicians, in which it flourished best, could only be obtained in the town.  To the most distinguished circle of that kind in London, our painter Reynolds belonged.