But consider what the effect of it must have been on the painters and their patrons at the time of its appearance. Northcote describes the picture as “an effort in composition so new to his barren competitors in art as must have struck them with dismay; for they dared not venture on such perilous flights of invention.” That there is little reason to doubt that Northcote was right in suggesting dismay and timidity as the prevailing emotions of the other painters may be allowed, if but for one moment we can blot out from our minds the existence of all English painting since that time. We can remember the effect produced upon the Academicians by the appearance of Whistler; but in those recent days opinion had been educated to recognise excellencies in painting, and it was only the novelty and disregard of existing convention that disturbed them. In 1750 the painters had had no such education, and they felt the double shock of the revelation of superlative excellence combined with startling novelty. Not that Reynolds must be regarded in any sense as a revolutionary. It would be truer to say that he was a revivalist. We may smile at Whistler’s naïve “Why drag in Velasquez?” but in the “originality” of Reynolds’s _Commodore Keppel_ and _Captain Orme_ we see no more than the fruits of a great mind fertilised by the continuous study of Vandyck and the Italian masters. In a gallery of the great portraits of the world, these achievements of Reynolds would fall as naturally into line with those of the older masters as the regular productions of the fashionable portrait painters of to-day assimilate with the thousands of pictures amongst which they are hung upon the walls of the Royal Academy. One might have said of them as Shakespeare said of the works of Time: “_Thy pyramids built up with newer might_ _To me are nothing novel, nothing strange,_ _They are but dressings of a former sight._” With all, or even a few, of the splendid series of male portraits, of which these two of Captain Orme and Lord Ligonier may be taken as the beginning, it is impossible to deal in so short a memoir. Among the most magnificent is that of Mr. Fane and his two guardians, from the Earl of Westmorland’s collection, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This must have been painted at the best period of Reynolds’s career, and shows him at the very top of his achievement in the painting of portraits of men. Not far below it, however, is the _Lord Heathfield_, which is here reproduced. This was one of the last portraits he painted, and yet shows little signs of diminishing vigour in the artist’s mind or hand.