At the height of his renown, Zoffany went off to Italy for years, with a commission from the King to copy the _Tribune_ of the Uffizi Gallery at Florence. This task he executed well, but as in his absence he had accepted other commissions from Kaiser Joseph II., and the title of Baron, an honour resented by George for a British subject, he seems to have lost the royal favour. Again, in a fit of disgust or adventurousness, he started off to India, where he must have had a wide field much to himself as a portrait painter, and thence brought back gorgeous pictures of _A Tiger Hunt_ and _A Cock Fight_, to revive his vogue in England. The latter picture had the curious history of costing an estate to a young Irishman who figures in it, his father, Robert Gregory, having threatened to disinherit him if ever he took part in cock-fighting. Mrs. Papendiek grew up intimate with Mrs. Zoffany, though this lady was looked on askance in the genteel society of Kew, having been a girl of humble birth, seduced by the painter at fourteen and married afterwards on the death of a deserted wife. She so far lived down the rather squalidly romantic story of her youth that her daughter’s hand was sought by a rich suitor, Colonel Martin of Leeds Castle, who shut himself up here in single cursedness when the obstinate young lady insisted on marrying a plain and awkward young man named Horn, whose father kept a prosperous school at Chiswick, a match that turned out ill--for the couple and for the school. Zoffany, his wanderings at an end, lived into the eighteenth century at Strand on the Green, and was buried in Kew Churchyard, by the east end of the church. On the south side, under the wall, are close together the graves of Meyer, Kirby, and Gainsborough, the last under a tomb restored in our time. Thomas Gainsborough lies here, not as a Kew resident, but buried by his own desire beside his lifelong friend and fellow East Anglian, Joshua Kirby, F.R.S., who began life as a coach-painter at Ipswich, and rose to fame as a writer on art and architecture. Helped on by Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds, Kirby had the luck to become teacher of perspective drawing to Prince George, and the King liked this master so well as to give him a permanent appointment as Clerk of the Works set on foot in Kew Gardens, under Sir William Chambers. At a house by the ferry-side he passed the rest of his life in ease and respect; but to our generation may be best known as father of Mrs. Trimmer, and uncle of William Kirby, the entomologist.