t she had never seen a sky like one in the picture
before them. "Possibly," growled the unruffled painter; "but don't you
wish you could?"

[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A BOY. FROM A PAINTING BY JOHN OPIE, IN THE
NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON.

This is believed to be a portrait of the painter's younger brother,
William Opie.]

Another phase of art--English, like that of Constable and Turner--rose
to its greatest popularity at about the same time. It had an origin
more easily traceable--the presence of Vandyke in England in the
seventeenth century having given an impulsion to portrait painting
which had been maintained by Reynolds and Gainsborough in the
century preceding our own. George Romney, who was born at Dalton, in
Lancashire, December 15, 1734, divided with these last two painters
the patronage of the great and wealthy of his time. He was but
eleven years younger than Reynolds, and seven years the junior of
Gainsborough; but by the fact of his living until November 15, 1802,
he may be considered in connection with the painters of this century.
He possessed great facility of brush, which led him occasionally into
careless drawing, and he lacked the refined grace of Reynolds and the
simple charm of Gainsborough. Nevertheless, a superabundance of the
qualities which go to make up a painter were his, and his art is less
affected by influences foreign to his native soil than that of any
painter of his time.

Romney was preeminently a painter of women, as were the majority
of his followers--English art at that time being possessed of more
sweetness than force. Lady Hamilton, the Circe who succeeded in
ensnaring the English Ulysses, Nelson, was a frequent model for
Romney, and the list of notable names of the fair women whose beauty
he perpetuated would be a long one. His life offers one of the most
curious examples of the engrossing nature of a painter's work, if we
accept this as the explanation of his strange conduct. Having come to
London from Kendal in 1762, leaving his wife and family behind him
in Lancashire, he remained in the metropolis for thirty-seven years,
making, during this time, but two visits to the place which he never
ceased to consider his home. It does not appear that anything but
absorption in work was the cause of this neglect. His wife and
children remained all the time in their northern home. In 1799, three
years before his death, the husband and father awoke to a realization
of their existence,