Anybody can paint a portrait. It is really easier than taking a photograph. One has only to look at contemporary representations of the younger members of one’s friends’ families in oil or pastel to realise that the ordinary person prefers a bad picture to a good photograph. There is something gratifying to the latent vanity of the sitter in the mere fact of sitting to a painter. In the old days, when there were no such things as photographs, the inducement to sit must have been still greater, and the demand for portraits enormous. Horace Walpole declares that there were no less than two thousand portrait painters in London in the middle of the eighteenth century: modern investigation has accounted for over seven hundred! To be a portrait painter, clearly, then was not to be an artist; and when we come to sift the artists from the mere likeness-mongers, we shall almost invariably find that the only great portraits were the work of men who excelled in other directions, as we have found in the cases of Reynolds and Gainsborough. Applying this test to Romney, it is quite surprising to discover how little is said of his portraiture [Illustration: MARIA MARGARET CLAVERING, AFTERWARDS LADY NAPIER Col. C. W. Napier Clavering] by his two earliest biographers, William Hayley, his life-long friend and admirer, and the Reverend John Romney, his son. Nor is there very much more, and certainly no indication of his present pre-eminence among the British portrait painters, in Allan Cunningham’s lengthy Memoir of him published in 1832. It is true that his popularity, amounting to serious rivalry of Reynolds at one period, is mentioned incidentally; as is also the devotion of his art to Lady Hamilton. But these are only considered as diversions, as it were, of his main purpose into a side channel. The dream of his life, we are to understand, was the achievement of historical compositions.