At last the regal portrait is finished, hanging in state upon the walls of the ‘Great Room’ belonging to the excellent Incorporated Society, when it opens its exhibition on the 22nd of April 1767. The artist is now a resident in Stafford Row, close to the Green Park, or, rather, as he prefers to particularise his address, ‘near the Queen’s Palace,’ upon whose picture, with the slumbering baby Princess in her arms, he is engaged. His portrait by Pierre Falconet, drawn during the next year, shows him a man in the prime of life, with clean-cut, delicate profile and a neat bob-wig tied by black ribbon, published by a dutiful pupil who trades as Bryer & Co. in Cornhill. This kind of trade, unhappily, has much allurement for Wynne Ryland, who, with his splendid monopoly of plates--the royal George, her maternal Majesty, the Modern Mæcenas with his shapely legs--seems to scent appetising profits. So Bryer & Co. becomes Ryland & Co., and any of the royal public who desire these regal portraits must purchase them from the proprietors at No. 27 Cornhill, near the Royal Exchange. Unhappily for this same No. 27, the public--enamoured of the Wilkes squint and disdaining the regal stare--do not treat these prints in the manner of hot cakes, and upon a fateful day in December 1771, No. 27 is in the hands of the broker’s men. Early in the same year a strange thing happens in Ryland’s studio. A proud father brings along his fourteen-year-old son, a boy of splendid and weird genius, as the sequel shows--a sequel prolific in pictures of the immortal sheik struggling against his environment of sands and storms and improvidence, which, like his interpreter Blake, sheik Job, overwhelmed by tree-trunk legs and half a gale of beard, regards as the judgment of his God. But this weird boy with the large head and amazing eyes objects to the parental scheme of making him a pupil of the great engraver. “Father, I do not like the man’s face,” murmurs boy Blake, when the pair have left Ryland’s studio. “It looks as if he will live to be hanged!” “Prescience, intuition--all the things not dreamt of in thy philosophy,” babble his legatee mystics, bowing the knee to jaundiced mind as rapturously as to portraits of human abortions, aping verbal harmony of empty sound, plastering deformities with giraffe necks and swollen limbs in a wealth of muddy hair and a saffron skin--good and sedulous disciples. Boy Blake can have heard nothing of the brother Richard hanging-escape! Such a small affair has never been breathed by fond parents who go to entrust a weird son to brother Wynne! Prescience, intuition, are more potent physical instincts than the throb of suggestion or empiric thought. Thus clamour legatee mystics, spurning the simple mental machinery put into motion by the association of ideas.