Stile_ to Colonel Hamilton, in return for his performance on the violin. It is pleasant, too, to know that whatever soreness of feeling existed between him and Sir Joshua, passed away before he died. When the President of the Royal Academy came to his dying bed, Gainsborough declared his reconciliation, and said, "We are all going to heaven, and Van Dyck is of the company." This was in 1788. Gainsborough was buried at Kew. The Englishness of his landscapes makes Gainsborough popular. Wilson had improved on the Dutch type by visiting Italy, but Gainsborough sought no other subjects than his own land afforded. Nature speaks in his portraits or from his landscapes, and his rustic children excel those of Reynolds, because they are really sun-browned peasants, not fine ladies and gentlemen masquerading in the dresses of villagers. Mr. Ruskin says of Gainsborough, "His power of colour (it is mentioned by Sir Joshua as his peculiar gift) is capable of taking rank beside that of Rubens; he is the purest colourist--Sir Joshua himself not excepted--of the whole English school; with him, in fact, the art of painting did in great part die, and exists not now in Europe. I hesitate not to say that in the management and quality of single and particular tints, in the purely technical part of painting, Turner is a child to Gainsborough." [Illustration: MRS. SIDDONS. _By_ GAINSBOROUGH. A.D. 1784. _In the National Gallery._] Among the most popular pictures by this great master are _The Blue Boy_, _The Shepherd Boy in the Shower_, _The Cottage Door_, _The Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher_, _The Shepherd Boys with their Dogs fighting_, _The Woodman and his Dog in the Storm_ (burnt at Eaton Park, engraved by Simon, and copied in needlework by Miss Linwood). There are thirteen pictures by Gainsborough in the National Gallery, including _The Market Cart_, _The Watering Place_, _Musidora_, _Portraits of Mrs. Siddons_, and _Orpin, the Parish Clerk of Bradford-on-Avon_. In the Royal Collection at Windsor are seventeen life-size heads of the sons and daughters of George III., of which, say the Messrs. Redgrave, "it is hardly possible to speak too highly." We may here fittingly mention a contemporary of Gainsborough, HUGH ROBINSON (about 1760--1790), who only gained a tardy though well-merited right to rank among England's portrait painters by the exhibition at the "Old Masters," in 1881, of his _Portrait of Thomas Teesdale_, which was followed in the next exhibition by the _Piping Boy_. The remainder of the works of this talented young Yorkshireman--who exhibited but three pictures at the Royal Academy (in 1780 and 1782), and who died on his way home from Italy, whither he had gone to study art--are chiefly family portraits. The two mentioned above best display his happy blending of landscape and portraiture, and, though somewhat recalling the manner of Gainsborough, are full of natural talent. [Illustration] CHAPTER V.