Reynolds now painted the portraits of Sir James Colebrooke, the Duchess of Hamilton, the Countess of Coventry, and the Dukes of Devonshire and Grafton. The two ladies were two beautiful Irish sisters. Horace Walpole tells us "how even the noble mob in the drawing-room clambered upon chairs and tables to look at them; how their doors were mobbed by crowds eager to see them get into their chairs, and places taken early at the theatres when they were expected; how seven hundred people sat up all night, in and about a Yorkshire inn, to see the Duchess of Hamilton get into her post-chaise in the morning; while a Worcester shoemaker made money by showing the shoe he was making for the Countess of Coventry." The latter, the elder and lovelier, died seven years after her marriage, from consumption. The Duchess of Hamilton, Reynolds painted again five years later, and a third time in a red dress and hat, on horseback, the Duke standing near her. "The evident desire which Reynolds had," writes Northcote, his pupil and biographer, "to render his pictures perfect to the utmost of his ability, and in each succeeding instance to surpass the former, occasioned his frequently making them inferior to what they had been in the course of the process; and when it was observed to him that probably he had never sent out to the world any one of his paintings in as perfect a state as it had been, he answered 'that he believed the remark was very just; but that, notwithstanding, he certainly gained ground by it on the whole, and improved himself by the experiment;' adding, 'if you are not bold enough to run the risk of losing, you can never hope to gain.' "With the same wish of advancing himself in the art, I have heard him say that whenever a new sitter came to him for a portrait, he always began it with a full determination to make it the best picture he had ever painted; neither would he allow it to be an excuse for his failure to say 'the subject was a bad one for a picture;' there was always nature, he would observe, which, if well treated, was fully sufficient for the purpose." The portrait of his friend Admiral Keppel, standing on a sandy beach, and back of him a tempestuous sea, did much to establish the reputation of Reynolds. He painted eight other pictures of this brave man, who entered the navy at ten and at eighteen had been round the world. "Keppel was the first of many heroes painted by Reynolds," writes Leslie, "who was never excelled, even by Velasquez, in the expression of heroism. So anxious was he to do all possible justice to his gallant friend, and so difficult did he find it to please himself, that after several sittings he effaced all he had done, and began the picture again....