Page:The Obligations of the Universities Towards Art.djvu/39

 For example, if painting the Princess Sophia of Gloucester, Velasquez, under such sense of responsibility, would have pourtrayed her in a dress such as only cruel ingenuity could devise to make her look as much as possible like a wooden doll. (It were ignorance not to appreciate this royal naturalist, but I don't think his most exclusive admirers, if unenslaved, can care about his 'infantas.') Reynolds represents the infant princess lying along the grass with her baby arm around the neck of a little Scotch terrier, which undulates its body on the opposite half of the picture, while the four eyes in the centre of the picture are staring at the spectator, the baby being just about to laugh and the dog at the point of barking.

It would take much too long a time to give the merest sketch of the man's endless invention, although to do any justice to the school of English painting inaugurated, after such long interruption, early in the last century, hundreds of examples of love and joy should be quoted, and Reynolds's noble rival and emulator, Gainsborough, should be particularized as able fully to match him in certain excellences; for he pourtrayed on the faces of beautiful damsels a smile as encharming as Luini's angels bear. And yet he was no imitator of the Milanese artist, for the Suffolk portrait-painter had never seen Luini's work, and how few artists there are who in the attempt to perpetuate the fleeting sunshine of a face do not make the expression painful and vulgar. In every way indeed Gainsborough was one who also gave the all-powerful 'touch of nature.' He never withheld his testimony to his rival's greatness; once,