In the lofty position which his talent had won him, Joseph Vernet was more capable than any other painter of giving a happy impulse to the art of engraving; and, indeed, the landscape engravers formed by him were masters of the genre. We have mentioned Balechou and Vivarès. The former, at first a pupil of Lépicié, began by engraving portraits, the best known of which, a full-length of Augustus III., King of Poland, brought upon its author the shame of a fitting punishment. Convicted of having detained a certain number of the first proofs for his own profit; Balechou was struck off the list of the Académie, and obliged to retire to Arles, his native town, and thence to Avignon, where he took to landscape engraving. There it was that he executed after Joseph Vernet his "Baigneuses," his "Calme," and his "La Tempête." In his latter years he returned to history, and executed after Carle Vanloo his tiresome "Sainte Geneviève," which was once so loudly vaunted, which even now is not unadmired, and which really might be a masterpiece, if technical skill and excessive ease of handling were all the art. Though, unlike Vivarès, he did not teach the practice of landscape in England, Balechou contributed enormously by his works to the education of the English engravers; and the best of them, Woollett, confessed that he produced his "Fishing" with a proof of the Frenchman's "La Tempête" always before his eyes. As for Vivarès, he engraved in Paris a number of plates after Joseph Vernet and the Old Masters, and then, preceding De Loutherbourg and many others of his nation, he migrated to London. He took with him a new art, as Hollar had done a century before, and founded that school of landscape engravers whose talents were destined to constitute, even to our own time, the chief glory of English engraving. But before his pupils and imitators could take possession after him of this vast domain, engraving in England had developed considerably, in another direction, under the influence of two distinguished artists, Hogarth and Reynolds, born at an interval of twenty-five years from one another. The son of a printer's reader, who apprenticed him to a goldsmith, William Hogarth spent almost all his youth in obscurity and poverty. At twenty he was engraving business cards for London tradesmen; some years later he was sign-painting, and was wearing himself out in work entirely unworthy of him, when he forced the attention of the public by the publication of a satirical print, the heroes of which were well known and easily recognised. His success being presently confirmed by other compositions of the same sort, he profited by the fact to apply his talent to more serious work. He soon acquired a reputation, enriched himself by marrying the daughter of Sir James Thornhill, the king's painter, and remained till his death (1764) one of the most eminent men of his country.