Of his portraits, in the present collection at the British Gallery, the only fine one is _A Portrait of a Youth_. This picture is from Lord Grosvenor’s collection, where it used to look remarkably well, and has been sometimes mistaken for a Vandyke. There is a spirited glow of youth about the face, and the attitude is striking and elegant. The drapery of blue satin is admirably painted. The _Portrait of Garrick_ is interesting as a piece of biography. He looks much more like a gentleman than in Reynolds’s tragi-comic representation of him.—There is a considerable lightness and intelligence in the expression of the face, and a piercing vivacity about the eyes, to which the attention is immediately directed. Gainsborough’s own portrait, which has, however, much truth and character, and makes a fine print, seems to have been painted with the handle of his brush. There is a portrait of _The Prince Regent leading a horse_, in which it must be confessed the man has the advantage of the animal. Gainsborough’s landscapes are of two classes, or periods; his early and his later pictures. The former are, we imagine, the best. They are imitations of nature, or of painters who imitated nature;—such as a _Woody Scene_; another, which is a fine imitation of Ruysdale; and a _Road Side, with figures_, which has great truth and clearness. His later pictures are flimsy caricatures of Rubens, who himself carried inattention to accuracy of detail to the utmost limit that it would bear. Lord Bacon says, that ‘distilled books are, like distilled waters, flashy things.’ The same may be said of pictures.—Gainsborough’s latter landscapes are bad water-colour drawings, washed in by mechanical movements of the hand, without any communication with the eye. The truth seems to be, that Gainsborough found there was something wanting in his ‘_early manner_,’—that is, something beyond mere literal imitation of natural objects, and he seems to have concluded, rather hastily, that the way to arrive at that _something more_, was to discard truth and nature altogether. He accordingly ran from one extreme into the other. We cannot conceive anything carried to a greater excess of slender execution and paltry glazing, than _A Fox hunted with grey-hounds_, _A romantic Landscape with Sheep at a Fountain_, and many others. We were, however, much pleased with an upright landscape, with figures, which has a fine, fresh appearance of the open sky, with a dash of the wildness of Salvator Rosa; and also with _A Bank of a River_, which is remarkable for the elegance of the forms and the real delicacy of the execution. _A Group of Cattle in a warm Landscape_ is an evident imitation of Rubens, but no more like to Rubens than ‘I to Hercules.’ _Landscape with a Waterfall_ should be noticed for the sparkling clearness of the distance. _Sportsmen in a Landscape_ is copied from Teniers with much taste and feeling, though very inferior to the original picture in Lord Radnor’s collection.