The word “portraits” it will be observed occurs but once in these passages; nor does it appear elsewhere in the sketch. If then it be admitted that neither Reynolds nor Gainsborough nor Romney were primarily portrait painters, and that their pre-eminence arises in a high degree from this cause, we shall have arrived at a standpoint from which to observe how each of the three was influenced by that cause in a different manner, and so obtain a better idea of their several excellences than we are likely to obtain from their “auction values.” In the first place, it is to be remembered that neither Reynolds nor Gainsborough was actually averse to painting portraits, whereas we have [Illustration: COLONEL THOMAS THORNTON Col. C. W. Napier Clavering] Romney’s written word that he hated it. Sir Joshua, to be sure, speaks of his charming little _Strawberry Girl_ as “One of the half-dozen original things that no man ever exceeds in his lifetime.” But he was quite content to receive as many as a hundred-and-fifty sitters in the course of a single year. Gainsborough, too, could go off into raptures at the beauties of the young princes and princesses when he was painting them at Winsdor, and write a flaming letter to the Royal Academy when the royal portraits were not hung as he desired. Both found their highest expression in portraiture, as did Romney; but whereas they were not slow to realise that their respective gifts, widely different as they were, fitted them pre-eminently for this sort of work, it would seem that Romney never realised it at all; and while the other two brought all their forces, consciously, to the beautification of this particular branch of their art, Romney appears to have done no more than acquiesce coldly but, be it observed, conscientiously, in the necessity for it. I would therefore submit that the chief characteristics which distinguish Romney’s portraits from those of his two greater contemporaries are coldness--or rather simplicity--and conscientiousness. These are conscious qualities, to which I would add a third, which I believe to be unconscious, that is to say, the influence of the classical art of the Greeks, which for the sake of brevity I will call classicism.