In the Exhibition of 1784 there appeared the famous _Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse_, of which Sir Joshua painted two if not three originals. One is at Grosvenor House, having been purchased in 1822 by the first Marquis of Westminster for 1760 guineas. (At the sale of Reynolds’s pictures in 1796 it fetched £700.) Another is in the Dulwich Gallery, and a third was given by Sir Joshua to Mr. Harvey, of Langley Park, Stowe, in exchange for a picture of a boar hunt by Snyders, which he admired very much. The Dulwich replica (which, according to Northcote, was painted by one of Reynolds’s assistants) was sold by Reynolds in 1789 to M. Desenfans--whose collection formed the bulk of the pictures now in the Dulwich Gallery--for £735. In this portrait, for once, we can find a certain reminiscence of Reynolds’s visit to Rome, namely in the resemblance of the attitude to that of Michel Angelo’s _Isaiah_ and the two attendant figures. It is recorded that Mrs. Siddons herself told Mr. Phillips “that it was the production of pure accident: Sir Joshua had begun the head and figure in a different view, but while he was occupied in the preparation of some colour she changed her position to look at a picture hanging on the wall of the room. When he again looked at her and saw the action she had assumed he requested her not to move, and thus arose the beautiful and expressive figure we now see in the picture.” But it is easy to understand that a [Illustration: THE AGE OF INNOCENCE 1788. National Gallery, London] slight turn of the head and a complete change of the expression, which would involve no alteration in the general pose, is enough to account for this anecdote. Mrs. Siddons is also reputed to have told a Miss Fanshawe, in whose journal the statement is preserved, that she did not think that Sir Joshua painted the duplicate now at Grosvenor House, but that the original was at Dulwich. This contradicts Northcote, and we may reasonably question Miss Fanshawe’s accuracy. Mrs. Siddons very possibly said a great deal about her picture which listeners were not concerned to take too literally, but we should like to believe her implicitly when she said that Sir Joshua intended to work considerably more on the face, but that on her telling him that she thought it quite perfect he deferred to her judgment, and left it as it was at the last sitting.