Page:Women in the Fine Arts From the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentiet.djvu/42

Rh whose lives and works I find no record, while the events related in other cases are too trivial for repetition. This is especially true in Holland, where we find many names of Dutch women who must have been reputable artists, since they are mentioned in Art Chronicles of their time; but we know little of their lives and can mention no pictures executed by them.

A national art now existed in England. Hogarth, who has been called the Father of English Painting, was a man of too much originality to be a mere imitator of foreign artists. He devoted his art to the representation of the follies of his time. As a satirist he was eminent, but his mirth-provoking pictures had a deeper purpose than that of amusing. Lord Orford wrote: "Mirth colored his pictures, but benevolence designed them. He smiled like Socrates, that men might not be offended at his lectures, and might learn to laugh at their own folly."

Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough were born and died in the eighteenth century ; their famous works were contemporary with the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768, when these artists, together with Angelica Kaufifman and Mary Moser, were among its original members.

It was a fashion in England at this time for women to paint; they principally affected miniature and water-color pictures, but of the many who called themselves artists few merit our attention; they practised but a feeble sort of imitative painting; their works of slight importance cannot now be named, while their lives were usually com-