From the entries in his pocket-book for 1755 it appears that no fewer than 120 people sat to Reynolds in that year, though he had only been established in London since the end of 1752. The pocket-book for 1756 is lost. In 1758, his busiest year of all, the number rose to 150. Two large military portraits exhibited in 1761 confirmed the reputation of the new painter, namely those of Captain Orme and Lord Ligonier. With these the public is more familiar than that of Keppel, as both are in the National Gallery, and they serve as well as any others to illustrate the extraordinary advance which their production marked in the history [Illustration: MRS. ROBINSON (“PERDITA”) 1784? Wallace Collection, London] of English portraiture, and indeed of painting in general. The passages previously quoted from Farington and Malone can hardly be regarded as over-florid when we try to imagine the effect of the sudden appearance of a portrait like that of Captain Orme in a country which was absolutely barren of fine painting. It is true that Hogarth had lately wrought several wonderfully vigorous achievements in unconventional portraiture, one or two of which--notably the _Bishop of Winchester_--are to be seen in an adjoining room at the National Gallery. But Hogarth was never a portrait painter, and admirable as his peculiar qualities were, to compare him with Reynolds is very much like comparing a blacksmith with a sculptor. Hogarth’s brush was like a sledge-hammer; every stroke went home, and his extraordinarily vivid presentments of Lord Boyne, Simon Lord Lovat, Captain Coram, and others seem rather to have been forged than painted--I do not, of course, mean counterfeited! Of other portraiture there was really none, beyond the skill of facial resemblance with which Walpole credits Jonathan Richardson, and the lackadaisical reminiscences of what had been worst in Kneller. Placed among several of the best works of Reynolds’s maturer period, as it is to-day, the _Captain Orme_ can hardly fail to arrest the attention alike of student or casual visitor. Whatever technical deficiencies the learned may discover in it--deficiencies which, as we have seen, he was never too ignorant to confess or too indolent to let be--the whole picture is stamped with the character of greatness. To us there is no strangeness, no surprise, in the originality of the composition, as there was to its first beholders. To us the easy pose of the figure standing beside the horse is only a source of enjoyment, and we feel as it were that there could have been no other possible way of painting the portrait with any success; that that was the one attitude in which Captain Orme appeared to any advantage. We recognise in it the work of a great master without any question as to its place in the history of painting.