reached his fortieth year. He occasionally painted subject pieces, aiming at the “grand style,” and his “St. Martin dividing his cloak” is in Vintners’ Hall, London. But his principal talents lay in the direction of landscape. “His compositions,” Redgrave says, “were too scenic, his trees, though spirited, were fanciful and exuberant in their forms, yet his works are by no means without merit.” [Illustration: ROARING RIVER ESTATE IN 1774 From an engraving by Thomas Vivares after a painting by George Robertson ] William Beckford also employed in Jamaica the talents of Philip Wickstead, a portrait painter, a pupil of Zoffany, and distinguished by his small whole-length portraits, whose acquaintance he had made in Rome in 1773. He accompanied his patron to Jamaica, and practised his art for a considerable time in the island. He speculated as a planter, but was unsuccessful. Losses led to drink, and his life was thereby shortened. He died before 1790. Beckford said of him, his “powers of painting were considerably weakened by his natural indolence, and more than all, by a wonderful eccentricity of character. His colouring was almost equal to that of any artist of his time, and the freedom and execution of his pencil were particularly apparent in his representation of negroes of every character, expression and age.” Unfortunately many of Wickstead’s drawings perished in the hurricane of 1780. In biographical dictionaries William Beckford is styled an historian, and, as we have seen, he wrote part of a History of France, but in his work on Jamaica he was content to reprint his historical facts from the “Jamaica Almanack” of the day, and apparently he did not know the year of the discovery of the island by Columbus, for he twice gives a wrong date, and his date for the Port Royal earthquake is also wrong. Much may be excused, however, in an historian who wrote in the Fleet prison. One trait he had in common with his kinsman and namesake—a true love of nature and the picturesque. But his description of the natural beauties of the island is couched in the somewhat high-flown style of the eighteenth century. The following is part of his description of the great hurricane which destroyed Savanna-la-Mar in 1780: