As one looks over the subjects of Gainsborough’s portraits, one understands in part how it was that, comparing them with Sir Joshua’s, or perhaps even with Romney’s, so few of them were engraved. Romney was, above all things, seductive: he saw Lady Hamilton--or when not Lady Hamilton, then some one who was almost equally pretty--in everything, and the public liked what he saw. Sir Joshua was a courtier, careful to be on the best of terms with the great world. Gainsborough courted nobody, and the world talked much less about him. Though, after the lapse of years, he succeeded in getting a hundred guineas for a full-length picture, and moved, without imprudence, from the cottage at Ipswich, rented at six pounds, first to the Circus at Bath, and then to the west wing of Schomberg House, Pall Mall, he was never really in his own time Sir Joshua’s rival in the public favour. And much of his best work in Portraiture--over and above that work in landscape which confessedly engaged his choice--was devoted to the record of people of the artistic rather than the fashionable world; people of professions the members of which were not in those days motioned to the velvet of the social sward. We have already spoken of more than one instance--and ‘Giardini,’ the fiddler, is another--of such a natural selection which governs Gainsborough’s art. It is as characteristic of him in portraiture as it is of Watteau in _genre_ pieces and gallant pastorals. But there is a little canvas, the portrait of an unknown Mrs. Carr, which holds its own either against portraits of people from the artistic world or people from Georgian ‘Society.’ It is curiously natural and refined in expression, exquisitely suggestive of elegant carriage, though so small a portion of the figure is seen, and as a piece of flesh-painting, it is unsurpassed by any of the more famous examples of Gainsborough’s skill. Who was ‘Mrs. Carr’? And had Gainsborough, we may wonder, some further interest in her than that which is aroused in any qualified observer of Humanity by the vision of such agreeable beauty? For Gainsborough, as a rule, painted best the models he knew the most. Executing every touch with his own hand, and doing his most picturesque with every model because he was so essentially artistic, he yet must have undertaken many a portrait of fashionable persons or of enriched _bourgeois_, into the dull recesses of whose character he did not care to penetrate. Where he knew and liked, he painted with delight. He was so profoundly impressionable: what he enjoyed stirred him: if somebody played the fiddle particularly well, tears of rapture stood on Gainsborough’s cheek.