[Illustration: GOYA. SE REPULEN. _From "Los Capriccios."_] In his portraits, too, he is unequal. He became the fashionable painter at the court. The politicians, poets, scholars, great ladies, actresses, all the famous folk of his epoch, sat to him. He daubed more than two hundred portraits; but they were good only when the subject amused him. His portraits of the Royal Family have something vicious and plebeian. He is too little in earnest, too little of an official, to paint court pictures. One might imagine that he with difficulty restrained himself from laughing at the pompous futility which stood before him. It irritated him to be obliged to paint these great lords and ladies in poses so ceremonial, instead of making them, like the angels of San Antonio, throw up their legs and skip over parapets. The Queen, Marie Louise, is frankly grotesque; and the family of Charles IV look like the family of a shopkeeper who have won the big prize in a lottery, and been photographed in their Sunday clothes. But, ah! when something gives him pleasure! In the Exhibition of Portraits at Paris, in 1885, there was the portrait of a young man, dressed in gray, which excelled Gainsborough for grace. With what a noble nonchalance this young elegant stands there, reminding one, in attitude and costume, of the _incroyables_ of Charles Vernet. With what equanimity does he look out on life, in his satisfaction at the good fit of his clothes. The wonderful harmony of the grey tones was rendered with all Gainsborough's delicacy. The same man who in those pictures of ceremony let himself go in a manner so brusque and frenzied, here revelled, a very Proteus in his chameleon-like qualities, in soft and mellow and seductive tones. One might say that he has thought here of Prudhon and Greuze, and joined their study to the cult of Velasquez. [Illustration: GOYA. QUE PICO DE ORO! _From "Los Capriccios."_]