Gainsborough

Others in Preparation.
PLATE I.—MRS. SIDDONS. (Frontispiece)
This famous portrait of Mrs. Siddons was painted in 1784. It is one of the chief ornaments in the National Gallery, London. It represents the celebrated actress in her twenty-ninth year. The picture was purchased in 1862 from a relative of Mrs. Siddons.

BY MAX ROTHSCHILD ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.



The British school of painting was, compared with those of the other nations of Western Europe, the latest to develop. In Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and even Scandinavia painting and sculpture flourished as early as the Gothic Age, and in most of these countries the Renaissance produced a host of craftsmen whose works still endure among the most superb creations of artistic genius. It is now inexact to say that there was no primitive period in British Art; the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, so resplendent on the Continent with pictures and statues reflecting the character, the aspirations, the temperament of the respective peoples that produced them, produced works of art also in these islands. There are ample records of pictures having been painted in England, both religious subjects and portraits, at a very early age, as far back even as the reign of Henry III.; of such remote productions little has been preserved, but there are still extant a few specimens, from the thirteenth century onwards, as well as portraits of Henry VI., Henry VII., and effigies of princes and earls, which cause us to mourn the loss of a large number of paintings; they are at times grotesque and so thoroughly bad as to be a quite negligible quantity as works of art, though no doubt historically interesting.

PLATE II.—RALPH SCHOMBERG, M.D.