c side of their life; instead of a
thrifty, tidy appearance, in which England's village children are by no
means lacking, he gives his subjects a careless, neglected air. The
Rustic Children of the National Gallery are unnecessarily ragged; their
hair is wild and dishevelled, and their general appearance untidy. Many
of the children of the most celebrated pictures are attractive from a
delicate, refined beauty, rather than from the robust and healthy
vitality we naturally associate with country life. This makes their
surroundings incongruous, and we feel sorry that they are not in their
true sphere. The child who stands, half-clad, before the hearth-fire, in
the painting called the "Little Cottager," has the delicate features of
a true aristocrat. No cottage boy this, with shapely hands and large,
melancholy eyes. His wistfulness is so touching that we would fain
snatch him from his surroundings, and set him down amidst the soft
luxuries which belong to him by right.

The Shepherd Boy in a Storm has the face and expression of a poet, as he
lifts his beautiful eyes to the overhanging clouds, with nothing of fear
or shrinking, but with apparent admiration for the grandeur of Nature.

Gainsborough painted many scenes of child-life in which animals are
introduced, as in the picture of a girl holding a child on a donkey, and
in one representing two shepherd boys looking on at fighting dogs. He
did not hesitate before a subject which would have appalled most
artists, and which, in other hands, would have been vulgar and
common,--A Girl Feeding Pigs. This he painted with such skill that
Reynolds instantly recognized its greatness, and eagerly purchased it
for a sum far in advance of the price modestly named by the painter. The
amusing anecdote is related concerning this work that a countryman, who
studied it attentively some time, gave it as his opinion that "they be
deadly like pigs; but nobody ever saw pigs feeding together but what one
on 'em had a foot in the trough."

Gainsborough[9] is pronounced by Ruskin the purest colorist of the
English school, taking rank beside Rubens, and adding a lustre to the
fame of British art which time can do nothing to dim. His style is so
peculiarly individual in its characteristics that it cannot properly
be compared with that of any other artist; but his predilection for
subjects drawn from rural child-life finds a parallel in the work of his
French contemporary, Jean Baptiste Greuze.[