In the eighteenth century, society had also begun to divide its time in modern fashion between town and country.  Many of the large country houses of to-day, and nearly all the landscape-gardened parks, belong to that date.  Nevertheless it was a time of great artificiality of life.  The ladies had no short country skirts, and none of the freedom to which we are accustomed.  In London they wore long powdered curls and rouged, and in the country too they did not escape from the artificiality of fashion.  Indeed, their great desire seems to have been to get away from everything natural and spontaneous.  The artificial poetry of that time deals with the patch-boxes and powder-puffs of the fashionable dames of the town, and with nymphs and Dresden china shepherdesses in the country.

Even on Reynolds’ canvases the desire to improve upon nature is apparent.  In his young days he painted the local personages of Devonshire.  Then he made a journey abroad and spent three years in Rome and Venice.  On his return he settled in London, and the most distinguished men and women of the day and their children sat to him.  It seems that he would have liked his lords and ladies to look as heroic or sublime as the heroes or gods of Michelangelo.  Instead of painting them in the surroundings that belonged to them, as Holbein or Velasquez would have done, he dressed his ladies in what he called white ‘drapery,’ a voluminous material, neither silk, satin, woollen, nor cotton, and painted them sailing through the woods.  The ladies themselves liked to look like nymphs, characterless and pretty, so the fashion of painting portraits in this way became common.

The pictures are pleasing to look at, although so artificial, and after all it was only full-length portraits of ladies that Reynolds treated in this way.  They were a small part of his whole output.  But he and Velasquez worked in a totally different spirit.  Velasquez made the subject before him, however unpromising, striking because of its truth.  Reynolds liked to change it on occasion into something quite different, for the sake of making a picture pretty.  Nevertheless, his strength lay in straightforward portraiture, and in the rendering of character.  His portraits of men, unlike those of women, are dignified, simple, and restrained.  His art was one long development till blindness prevented him from working.  Every year he attained more freedom and naturalness in his pose and developed more power in his use of colour.

[Illustration:  THE DUKE OF GLOUCESTER From the picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds, in Trinity College, Cambridge]