His wife, who was in her youth a rose and brown coloured beauty, and whose countenance was long afterwards lustrous enough under the becoming grey of her powdered hair, Gainsborough painted several times, and always with distinction and conspicuous artistry. His handling of the subject is best in the portrait numbered 175--a worthy companion to his own sensitive and high-bred countenance (No. 185). And his portraits of his daughters--his only children--are at the least satisfying. One is a group--the two together; another is a half-length of Mrs. Fischer; another, again, a half-length of the brighter personality who remained ‘Miss Gainsborough.’ There is some likeness between the two young women, in the general contour of the head and in the fulness of the under-lip. ‘Miss Gainsborough,’ with her clear brown eyes, delicate eyebrows, compact and intelligent forehead, is the greater beauty; but to Mrs. Fischer there belongs a winning expression of pathetic reverie. Both are felt to be the true daughters of their father: the one by her possession of the gaiety and fire of temper which characterised Gainsborough in his happiest times; the other by her obvious inheritance of what proved more than her share of Gainsborough’s keen perception of the sadness of so much of human fortune. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was almost wholly intellectual and ‘practical,’ who lived on the outside of things, had nothing of Gainsborough’s sense of profundity and pathos. And, in so far as he had nothing of this, he was, in the essentials of character, the less of an artist. For Goethe said--and when he said it he was uttering one of the deepest of his truths--‘To be artistic is to be serious.’ (_The Standard_, 1st and 6th January 1885.) COTMAN