Even on Reynolds' canvases the desire to improve upon nature is
apparent. In his young days he painted the local personages of
Devonshire. Then he made a journey abroad and spent three years in
Rome and Venice. On his return he settled in London, and the most
distinguished men and women of the day and their children sat to him.
It seems that he would have liked his lords and ladies to look as heroic
or sublime as the heroes or gods of Michelangelo. Instead of painting
them in the surroundings that belonged to them, as Holbein or Velasquez
would have done, he dressed his ladies in what he called white
'drapery,' a voluminous material, neither silk, satin, woollen, nor
cotton, and painted them sailing through the woods. The ladies
themselves liked to look like nymphs, characterless and pretty, so
the fashion of painting portraits in this way became common.

The pictures are pleasing to look at, although so artificial, and after
all it was only full-length portraits of ladies that Reynolds treated
in this way. They were a small part of his whole output. But he and
Velasquez worked in a totally different spirit. Velasquez made the
subject before him, however unpromising, striking because of its truth.
Reynolds liked to change it on occasion into something quite different,
for the sake of making a picture pretty. Nevertheless, his strength
lay in straightforward portraiture, and in the rendering of character.
His portraits of men, unlike those of women, are dignified, simple,
and restrained. His art was one long development till blindness
prevented him from working. Every year he attained more freedom and
naturalness in his pose and developed more power in his use of colour.

[Illustration: THE DUKE OF GLOUCESTER
From the picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds, in Trinity College, Cambridge]

Many would say that his loveliest achievements were portraits of
children, yet he did not attain the same freedom in his child poses
till late in life. You have all seen photographs, at any rate, of the
'Age of Innocence' and the 'Heads of Angels,' but this little picture
of the Duke of Gloucester, nephew of George III., will not be so
familiar. I wonder whether it reminds you of anything you know? It
reminds me of Van Dyck. The little duke stands with an air of importance
upon the hillside, which is raised above the eye of the spectator as
Velasquez raised the ground beneath the pony of Don Balthazar Carlos.
There is no mistake about the c