Take, for instance, the two portraits of Mrs. Siddons: the learning and tradition of the Schools, the disposition towards a dignity that may be well-nigh pompous, are in Sir Joshua’s ‘Tragic Muse’; the spontaneous grace, the disposition towards simplicity are in the Mrs. Siddons of Gainsborough. Further, again, to compare the portraits of Dr. Johnson by Sir Joshua with that one by Gainsborough at the Grosvenor Gallery, is to see that here is an instance in which the fidelity--the unflattering fidelity--is on Reynolds’ side, and the idealisation on Gainsborough’s. Yet it is hardly needful to declare of so great a man as Gainsborough that he never idealised merely that he might flatter. He idealised because his vision of the world was bound to be poetic. He was a poet above all things. The ideal was his atmosphere. But Sir Joshua, with all his accomplishments, lived with the prose of the world, and, as a rule, was but in vain ambitious to reach to its poetry. The poetic character of Gainsborough’s mind and work is, then, the first thing to be realised, if we are to understand his pictures. For otherwise we shall be offended at exaggerations and astonished at suppressions, both of which are the result of a method he adopted in obedience to his temperament, which combined, of course, a gentle and genuine love of Nature with a consuming thirst to see that Nature was never deprived of the assistance of Art. Gainsborough has been written of as the earliest Master of Naturalism--save, indeed, Hogarth--in the English School. Nor is the description untrue; in the sense that he sought his inspiration from Nature, instead of from academies, and that his landscape had more than a suggestion of Suffolk or of Somerset. Yet Morland carried Naturalism much further than Gainsborough, and Constable much further than Morland. Gainsborough was never a mere copyist of Nature. From the first he composed and arranged, but his artifices were seldom very apparent, and his control over actual form--his artistic modification of it--was gentle and tempered, and this is most of all made evident by the display of his Landscape. With the permanent exhibition at the National Gallery and the annually recurring winter shows at Burlington House, no one of course has any need to be ignorant of the fact that one of the most fascinating of the painters of portraits was also a landscape painter. But the display at the Grosvenor Gallery will bring home to people a truth some may have overlooked, because at the Grosvenor Gallery Gainsborough’s range in landscape work is seen to have been extensive. No single early painting there, indeed, can claim to be quite the equal of the ‘Great Cornard’ picture in Trafalgar Square, but the paintings are so many, and the subjects so varied, that the impression they produce must be great. In the East Room, the smaller room, are some of the most interesting of these landscapes. There--to begin with only a