to light!

The fact is that the state of society in the middle of the eighteenth
century was, with all its brilliance and intellect, the cause of
hampering the natural development of the three great painters of that
period. Reynolds came back from his stay in Italy an ardent disciple of
the grand style, burning to follow the example of Raphael and
Michelangelo. Romney, too, was all for Italian art, but looked further
back, and worshipped the classics. Gainsborough was a born landscape
painter, and his whole time was devoted, when he was not executing
commissions for portraits, to making sketches and studies of woods and
valleys and trees. But so bent on having their likenesses handed about
were the brilliant personages of their time, that Reynolds, Gainsborough
and Romney were compelled in spite of themselves to turn their
attention to portraiture, to the exclusion of every other branch of
their art, and as portrait painters they have made themselves and their
country famous.

In the numerous sketches and studies that Gainsborough has left us, we
can see how much we have lost in gaining his wonderful portraits. He
loved landscape, from his earliest youth to his dying day. Loved it for
itself. For among all the drawings of his which I have ever seen, I do
not remember one which can be identified as any particular place. In the
eighteenth century there was a perfect mania among the smaller fry for
making topographical drawings, in pencil or water-colour, views of some
town or mountain or castle. But with Gainsborough the place was
nothing--it was the spirit of it that charmed him. A cottage in a wood,
a glade, a country road, a valley, was to him a beautiful scene,
whatever it was called or wherever it happened to be, and out of it
accordingly he made a beautiful picture, or at least a drawing. That his
pictures of landscape are so extraordinarily few while his drawings are
so numerous, may be accounted for in a great measure by the exigences of
portrait painting, but not entirely; and the probability is that there
are many more which are now forgotten.

For an estimate of Thomas Gainsborough both in regard to his place in
the story of the English School and to the abilities and methods by
which he attained it, it is needless to look elsewhere than to that of
Sir Joshua Reynolds, contained in the discourse delivered shortly after
Gainsborough's death:--

"When such a man as Gainsborough rises to great fame without the