and returned to live with them.

[Illustration: JOHN HOPPNER. FROM A DRAWING BY GEORGE DANCE, NOVEMBER
10, 1793.]

John Opie, known as the "Cornish genius" when his first works,
executed at the age of twenty, were exhibited in the Royal Academy,
was a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was born at Truro in May, 1761,
the son of a carpenter. His precocity attracted the notice of Dr.
Wolcot ("Peter Pindar"), who introduced him to Reynolds.

Opie is thoroughly English in his manner, having, however, more
affiliation to Hogarth and the earlier painters of his century than
to his master. A certain hardness and lack of color are his principal
defects; but, on the other hand, his work is sincere to a degree which
none of the other painters of his time show, preoccupied as were even
the best of them by a somewhat conventional type of beauty. He was
appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy in 1805, but
delivered only one course of lectures, dying, at the age of forty-six,
April 9, 1807.

[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A LADY. FROM A PAINTING KNOWN AS "THE CORAL
NECKLACE," BY JOHN HOPPNER.

From the collection of George A. Hearn of New York, by whose courtesy
it appears here. Quaint and charming as a picture, of great beauty of
color in the original, this is an admirable example of this painter.
The original painting is at present on exhibition at the Metropolitan
Museum, New York.]

During the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first years
of the nineteenth, the fashionable portrait painters of London were
John Hoppner and Sir Thomas Lawrence. The latter, living twenty years
longer than Hoppner, was able to generously say of him, in a letter
written shortly after Hoppner's death: "You will believe that I
sincerely feel the loss of a brother artist from whose works I have
often gained instruction, and who has gone by my side in the race
these eighteen years."

Born in Whitechapel, London, April 4, 1758, Hoppner's first vocation
was that of chorister in the Chapel Royal. By lucky accident his first
efforts at painting attracted the attention of the king, George III.,
who granted him a small allowance which enabled him to study in the
Royal Academy, where, in 1782, he gained the medal for oil painting.
He first exhibited in 1780, and for some years devoted himself
to landscape. Gradually changing to portraiture, he was appointed
portrait painter to the Prince of Wales in 1789, and in 1793 he was
made an