gland, when he was about thirty years
of age, in 1675. London became his home. There he painted portraits with
great success; his prices being fifteen guineas for a head, twenty if
with one hand, thirty for a half, and sixty for a whole-length portrait.
Charles II, sat at the same time to Kneller and to Lely. Not Titian
himself painted more crowned heads than it fell to the lot of Kneller to
paint--not less than six reigning kings and queens of England, and, in
addition, Louis XIV. of France, Charles VI, of Spain, and the Czar Peter
of Russia.

William III, created Kneller a knight, and George I, raised the
painter's rank to that of a baronet. Sir Godfrey was notorious for his
conceit, irritability, and eccentricity, and for the wit which sparkled
more in his conversation than in any originality of observation
displayed in his painting. Walpole attributes to Kneller the opposite
qualities of great negligence and great love of money. The negligence or
slovenliness, whether in the man or the artist, did not interfere with
an immense capacity for work, such as it was, but if Horace Walpole be
right, that Kneller employed many Flemish painters under him to
undertake the wigs, draperies, etc. etc., the amount of work in portrait
painting which Sir Godfrey Kneller accomplished is so far explained. He
attained the end of being a very rich man, and married an English woman,
but left no family to succeed to his wealth and his country-seat of
Whitton, when he died at his house in London in his seventy-eighth year,
in 1723.

As a painter Sir Godfrey Kneller showed considerable talent in drawing,
and a certain cumbrous dignity of design, but he had much more industry
of a certain kind than artistic feeling or taste. When he and Lely
painted Charles II, together, Kneller's application and rapidity of
execution were so far before those of Lely, who was technically the
better painter of the two, that Kneller's picture was finished when
Lely's was dead-coloured only. Kneller was highly praised by Dryden,
Addison, Prior, and Steele. Apropos of these writers, among the most
famous works of Kneller are the forty-three portraits, painted
originally for Tonson, the bookseller, of the members of the Kit Cat
club, the social and literary club of the day, which got its name from
the chance of its holding its meetings in a house the owner of which
bore the unique name of Christopher Cat. Another series of portraits by
Kneller are what ought t