Another phase of art--English, like that of Constable and Turner--rose to its greatest popularity at about the same time. It had an origin more easily traceable--the presence of Vandyke in England in the seventeenth century having given an impulsion to portrait painting which had been maintained by Reynolds and Gainsborough in the century preceding our own. George Romney, who was born at Dalton, in Lancashire, December 15, 1734, divided with these last two painters the patronage of the great and wealthy of his time. He was but eleven years younger than Reynolds, and seven years the junior of Gainsborough; but by the fact of his living until November 15, 1802, he may be considered in connection with the painters of this century. He possessed great facility of brush, which led him occasionally into careless drawing, and he lacked the refined grace of Reynolds and the simple charm of Gainsborough. Nevertheless, a superabundance of the qualities which go to make up a painter were his, and his art is less affected by influences foreign to his native soil than that of any painter of his time. Romney was preëminently a painter of women, as were the majority of his followers--English art at that time being possessed of more sweetness than force. Lady Hamilton, the Circe who succeeded in ensnaring the English Ulysses, Nelson, was a frequent model for Romney, and the list of notable names of the fair women whose beauty he perpetuated would be a long one. His life offers one of the most curious examples of the engrossing nature of a painter's work, if we accept this as the explanation of his strange conduct. Having come to London from Kendal in 1762, leaving his wife and family behind him in Lancashire, he remained in the metropolis for thirty-seven years, making, during this time, but two visits to the place which he never ceased to consider his home. It does not appear that anything but absorption in work was the cause of this neglect. His wife and children remained all the time in their northern home. In 1799, three years before his death, the husband and father awoke to a realization of their existence, and returned to live with them. [Illustration: JOHN HOPPNER. FROM A DRAWING BY GEORGE DANCE, NOVEMBER 10, 1793.] John Opie, known as the "Cornish genius" when his first works, executed at the age of twenty, were exhibited in the Royal Academy, was a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was born at Truro in May, 1761, the son of a carpenter. His precocity attracted the notice of Dr. Wolcot ("Peter Pindar"), who introduced him to Reynolds.