The “Mortal Man” at Troutbeck, in the Lake district, once possessed a pictorial sign, painted by Julius Cæsar Ibbetson, a gifted but dissolute artist, friend of, and kindred spirit with, Morland. It represented two faces, the one melancholy, pallid and thin, the other hearty, good-humoured, and “ruddier than the cherry.” Beneath these two countenances was inscribed a verse attributed to Thomas Hoggart, a local wit, uncle of Hogarth, the painter: “Thou mortal man, that liv’st by bread, What makes thy face to look so red?” “Thou silly fop, that look’st so pale, ’Tis red with Tony Burchett’s ale.” First went the heads, and at last the verses also, and to-day the “Mortal Man” has only a plain sign. John Crome, founder of the “Norwich School” of artists, known as “Old” Crome, in order to distinguish him from his son, contributed to this list of signs painted by artists. It is not surprising that he should have done so, seeing that he won to distinction from the very lowest rungs of the ladder; leaving, as a boy, the occupation of running errands for a doctor, and commencing art in 1783 as apprentice to a coach-, house-, and sign-painter. One work of his of this period is the “Sawyers” sign. It is now preserved at the Anchor Brewery, Pockthorpe, Norwich. Representing a saw-pit, with two sawyers at work, it shows the full-length figure of the top-sawyer and the head and shoulders of the other. It is, however, a very inferior and fumbling piece of work, and its interest is wholly sentimental. J. F. Herring, afterwards famous for his paintings of horses and farmyard scenes, began as a coach-painter and sign-board artist at Doncaster, in 1814. He painted at least twelve inn-signs in that town, but they have long since become things of the past. Charles Herring never reached the heights of fame scaled by his brother, and long painted signs for a great firm of London brewers. However difficult it might prove nowadays to rise from the humble occupations of house- or coach-painter, to the full glory of a Royal Academician, it seems once to have been a comparatively easy transition. All that was requisite was the genius for it, and sometimes not very much of that. A case in point is that of Sir William Beechey, who not only won to such distinction in 1793 from the several stages of house-painter and solicitor’s clerk, but achieved the further and more dazzling success of knighthood, although never more than an indifferent portrait-painter. A specimen of his art, in the shape of the sign-board of the “Dryden’s Head,” near Kate’s Cabin, on the Great North Road, was long pointed out.