Another method that modern artists have sometimes adopted in painting sacred subjects, is to imitate the faulty drawing and incomplete representation of life which are present in the art of the Old Masters.  But this conscious imitation of bygone ignorance beguiles no one who has once felt the charm of the painters before Raphael.

Reynolds’ great contemporary, Gainsborough, has been called ’a child of nature.’  He would have liked to live in the country always and paint landscapes.  He did paint many of his native Suffolk, but in his day landscapes were unsaleable, so he was driven to the town and to portrait painting to make a living.  Less than Reynolds a painter of character, Gainsborough reproduced the superficial expression of his sitters.  But he had so natural an eye for grace and beauty, that his portraits always please.  He did not attempt Reynolds’ wide range of subjects or the same difficulties of pose.  Of Reynolds he said:  ’How various he is,’ but his admiration did not make him stray from his natural path to attempt the variety of another.  Reynolds, equally admiring, said of him:  ‘I cannot make out how he produces his effects.’  Perhaps Gainsborough did not know either.  He does seem to paint by instinct, and successive pictures became more pleasing.  Buoyant in his life as in his art, his last words were:  ’We are all going to Heaven, and Van Dyck is of the company.’

Another great contemporary painter was Romney, whose portraits of ladies are delightful.  Figured as nymphs too, they are so buoyant with bright expressions and wayward locks, that one wishes he had depicted in their faces a soul.

All over England and Scotland portrait painters flourished at this time.  There were so many English artists that in 1768 the Royal Academy was founded, with Sir Joshua Reynolds as its first president.  It was to the students of the Royal Academy that he delivered his Discourses upon Art, setting forth the principles which he judged to be sound.  He was an indefatigably hard worker until within two years of his death in 1792.  All classes of men esteemed and regretted him, clouded though his intercourse with them had been by the deafness from which he suffered during the greater part of his life.

Goldsmith, the author of the Vicar of Wakefield, wrote this character ‘epitaph’ for him: 

  Here Reynolds is laid, and to tell you my mind,
  He has not left a wiser or better behind. 
  His pencil was striking, resistless and grand;
  His manners were gentle, complying and bland;
  Still born to improve us in every part,
  His pencil our faces, his manners our heart. 
  To coxcombs averse, yet most civilly steering
  When they judged without skill, he was still hard of hearing. 
  When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios and stuff,
  He shifted his trumpet and only took snuff. 
  By flattery unspoiled ...

The end is missing, for while Goldsmith was versifying so feelingly about his friend, death overtook the writer, eighteen years before the subject of the epitaph.