Coloured aquatints were now becoming the rage. That this charming and delicate process, producing various gradations of tone by successive “bitings” with acid through a porous, resinous ground, might long before have competed with stipple, may be judged by the delightful pair of colour-printed aquatints, _Courtship_ and _Matrimony_, by Francis Jukes after W. Williams, published in 1787 by J. R. Smith. But, invented in France about 1750 by Jean Baptiste Prince, practised a little later with colour by Ploos Van Amstel, and introduced to England in 1775 by Paul Sandby for the treatment of landscape, it was a long while before the pictorial capacities of aquatint were adequately understood and extended. In the artistic hands of the Daniells, the Havells, J. C. Stadler, J. Bluck, J. Sutherland and F. C. Lewis, it became, particularly under the ægis of Ackermann, a most popular medium for colour, especially in the sporting and coaching prints which the Regency spirit brought so extensively into demand. Then in turn came lithography, with its ease of method and its sweet, soft graces, bringing colour too; and R. J. Lane was the new hero of the printsellers, while for long years Bartolozzi and his brother stipplers on the copper-plate were shelved, neglected, forgotten, and Morland prints were scarcely saleable. To-day they have come into their own again--their own, and perhaps a little bit over. NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS. COUNTESS OF HARRINGTON AND HER CHILDREN (Plate I.). Sir Joshua painted her twice also as Miss Fleming.--ROBINETTA (Plate II.). The Hon. Anna Tollemache was the original of this picture, of which Reynolds painted three versions: that in the National Gallery, Lord Lonsdale’s, and Lord Tollemache’s, from which Jones made his engraving, dedicating it to the picture’s then owner the Hon. William Tollemache.--MASTER HENRY HOARE (Plate III.). The only son of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Bart., F.R.S., the well-known antiquarian and historian of Wiltshire.--DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE AND CHILD (Plate IV.). One of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s thirteen exhibits in the Royal Academy of 1786, when Walpole depreciated it. Here is the famous duchess in that tender mother-mood in which Coleridge apostrophised her so exquisitely. The chubby baby, when she grew up, very properly married the son and heir of that Earl of Carlisle who in graceful verse had championed her mother’s introduction of the fashion of feathers.--THE MASK (Plate V.). Part of the “Duke of Marlborough and family,” which Sir Joshua painted in 1777. The little Ladies Charlotte and Anne Spencer, being taken into the room at Blenheim where Sir Joshua sat at his easel, the youngest drew back, clutching at her nurse’s gown, crying “I won’t be painted!” a natural action which appealed irresistibly to Reynolds. And little Lady Anne, as Countess of Shaftesbury, lived until 1865, the last survivor of all Sir Joshua Reynolds’s countless sitters.