They have either left us hideous and literal transcripts of the awkward, tight-laced, behooped, and bewigged generation of beaux and belles before them; or, quitting all probability, or even possibility, have given us Arcadian shepherdesses, and soi-disant Greeks and Romans, where wigs and flounces and frippery mingle with crooks, sheep, thunderbolts, and Roman draperies.[576] The darkness that seemed thus at the middle of the century to be settling down around the art of portrait painting was, however, the darkness that precedes the dawn, or, in this instance, the full day, for with the first portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds after he returned from Rome in 1752, and with the work of Thomas Gainsborough, his immediate contemporary, we enter upon the supreme period of British portraiture, a period in which there seemed suddenly to spring into being all the grace and skill, all the sense of beauty and poetry, all the power of imaginative interpretation, that had been waning in English art annals since the days of Vandyck. And with this great revival in the art there came a striking revival of interest in the use of landscape in portraiture. Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92) made use of landscape backgrounds in portraits of various kinds. His full-length portrait of Keppel was completed in 1753 and was the picture that established his fame. It is thus described by Lord Gower: “The gallant young sailor is represented as literally walking out of the canvas. His countenance is full of animation, and as he seems to step briskly, bareheaded, across the beach, his locks are blown backward from his forehead by the gale.... In the background a wild sea breaks on the shore.” This portrait, says Lord Gower, “made an epoch in that form of art.”[577] The epoch-making characteristics of the picture were, in the first place, the striking animation and naturalness of the figure as opposed to the monotony and woodenness of pose adopted by artists such as Hudson, and, in the second place, the genuine open-air effect of the whole picture, the perfectly simple and natural union of the figure and the landscape. In some other portraits of men Reynolds made use of landscape backgrounds, as in the half-lengths of Admiral Keppel (1780) and that of Lord Heathfield (1787) in which the figures stand forth boldly against a stormy sky with a suggestion of an ocean view. Some landscapes show reminiscences of Vandyck, as in the backgrounds of the equestrian portraits of Captain Orme (exhibited 1761) and Lord Ligonier[578] (about 1760), or in the conventionalized tree-trunks and distant view in the half-length of the archbishop of Armagh.[579] It is, however, in full-lengths of women and children, either singly or in groups, that Sir Joshua makes freest use of landscape. The little Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester, a chubby baby rolling on the grass with her dog; Prince William of Gloucester in plum-colored cavalier costume