glance. Look for example at the affianced bride playing with her wedding ring in the first of the Marriage à la Mode series. Before Hogarth had run his course, Reynolds appeared with a mandate from other sources of life, or rather from another side of the same life; for it is interesting to note that they both depicted England at the same epoch, and both men take higher rank by the contrast.
Certainly Reynolds did not take the course of a prophet of wrath; he had not the temper to see the evils around him. In fact he brought out the children from the courts and alleys of the town and made them into poems; a link-boy he converted into Cupid, a beggar-man into a 'banished lord,' and a broken-down ancient with the mould of noble breed was promoted to poetic humiliation as Count Ugolino; at times he transformed ladies of mysterious status into heroines such as men would die for. He spent himself freely day by day on something rich and rare, and he adds just this one distinction in his portraiture which it never thoroughly had before—the genius of unselfish love irradiating the pictured beings.
There is a display, splendid indeed, about a portrait of Titian, Raphael, and Velasquez, which is ever dignified, beautiful, and often supremely graceful, but it is display of a kind which affects your soul with nothing beyond intense admiration. The first English portrait-painter was not satisfied in reliance upon such claim to the approval of his patrons (unless perhaps when the subject was a man of defiant character or a lady of frivolous mind).
