Hoppner now produced but few pictures, and these met with small success. He looked thin and haggard, talked incoherently, gave way to bitter repinings and despondency. He resented and misinterpreted, as has been shown, Lawrence's inquiries as to his health. Certainly there is every appearance of feeling in Lawrence's letter, where he writes to a friend, 'You will be sorry to hear it. My most powerful competitor, he whom only to my friends I have acknowledged as my rival, is, I fear, sinking to the grave. I mean, of course, Hoppner. He was always afflicted with bilious and liver complaints (and to these must be greatly attributed the irritation of his mind), and now they have ended in a confirmed dropsy. But though I think he cannot recover, I do not wish that his last illness should be so reported by me. You will believe that I can sincerely feel the loss of a brother-artist from whose works I have often gained instruction, and who has gone by my side in the race these eighteen years.' Hoppner died on the 23d January 1810, in the fifty-first year of his age. To quote Lawrence's letters again: 'The death of Hoppner leaves me, it is true, without a rival, and this has been acknowledged to me by the ablest of my present competitors; but I already find one small misfortune attending it—namely, that I have no sharer in the watchful jealousy, I will not say hatred, that follows the situation.' A son of Hoppner's was consul at Venice, and a friend of Lord Byron's in 1819.
'Hoppner,' says Haydon, 'was a man of fine mind, great nobleness of heart, and an exquisite taste for music; but he had not strength for originality. He imitated Gainsborough for landscape, and Reynolds for portraits.' He held Northcote, Sir Joshua's pupil, however, in great aversion. 'I can fancy a man fond of his art who painted like Reynolds,' Hoppner would say; 'but how a man can be fond of art who paints like that fellow Northcote, Heaven only knows!' There was no love lost between them. 'As to that poor man-milliner of a painter Hoppner,' said Northcote, 'I hate him, sir, I ha-a-ate him!'
According to Haydon, he was bilious from hard work at portraits and the harass of fashionable life. And his post of portrait-painter to the Prince had its trials. The Carlton House porter had been ordered to get the railings fresh painted. In his ignorance the man went to Hoppner to request his attention to the matter. Wasn't he the Prince's painter? Hoppner was furious!
VI.
The factions of Reynolds and Romney lived again in the rivalry of Hoppner and Lawrence. The painters appeared to be well matched. Hoppner had the advantage of a start of ten years, though this was nearly balanced by the very early age at which Lawrence obtained many of his successes. Hoppner was also a handsome man, of refined address and polished manner; he, too, possessed great conversational powers, while in the matter of wit and humour he was probably in advance of his antagonist. He was well read—'one of the best-informed painters of his time,' Mr. Cunningham informs us—frank, out-spoken, open-hearted, gay, and whimsical. He had all the qualifications for a social success, and was not without some of those 'Corinthian' characteristics which were indispensable to a man of fashion, from the Prince of Wales's point of view. With Edrige, the associate miniature-painter, and two other artists, he was once at a fair in the country where strong ale was abounding, and much fun, and drollery, and din. Hoppner turned to his friends. 'You have always seen me,'he said, 'in good company, and playing the courtier, and taken me, I daresay, for a deuced well-bred fellow, and genteel withal. All a mistake. I love low company, and am a bit of a ready-made blackguard.' He pulls up his collar, twitches his neckcloth, sets his hat awry, and with a mad humorous look in his eyes, is soon in the thickest of the crowd of rustic revellers. He jests, gambols, dances, soon to quarrel and fight. He roughly handles a brawny waggoner, a practised boxer, in a regular scientific set-to; gives his defeated antagonist half a guinea, rearranges his toilet, and retires with his friends amidst the cheers of the crowd. It is quite a Tom-and-Jerry scene. Gentlemen delighted to fight coal-heavers in those days. Somehow we always hear of the gentlemen being victorious; perhaps if the coal-heavers could tell the story, it would sometimes have a different dénouement. Unfortunately for Hoppner, he had to use his fingers, not his fists, against Lawrence—to paint him down, not fight him.
He was a skilful artist, working with an eye to Sir Joshua's manner, and following him oftentimes into error, as well as into truth and beauty. Ridiculing the loose touches of Lawrence, he was frequently as faulty, without ever reaching the real fascination of his rival's style. He had not the Lawrence sense of expression and charm; he could not give to his heads the vivacity and flutter, the brilliance and witchery, of Sir Thomas's portraits. They both took up Reynolds's theory about it being 'a vulgar error to make things too like themselves,' as though it were a merit to paint untruthfully. And painting people of fashion, they had to paint—especially in their earlier days—strange fashions; and an extravagant, and fantastic, and meretricious air clings as a consequence to many of their pictures; for the Prince of Wales had then a grand head of hair (his own hair), which he delighted to pomatum, and powder, and frizzle; and, of course, the gentlemen of the day followed the mode; and then the folds and folds of white muslin that swathed the chins and necks of the sitters; and the coats, with fanciful collars and lapels; and the waistcoats, many-topped and many-hued, winding about in tortuous lines. It is not to be much marvelled at that such items of costume as 'Cumberland corsets,' 'Petersham trousers,' 'Brummel cravats,' 'Osbaldistone ties,' and 'Exquisite crops,' should be only sketchily rendered in paint. Of course, Mr. Opie, who affected thorough John Bullism in art, who laid on his pigments steadily with a trowel, and produced portraits of ladies like washerwomen, and gentlemen liking Wapping publicans—of course, unsentimental, unfashionable Mr. Opie denounced the degeneracy of his competitor's style. 'Lawrence makes coxcombs of his sitters, and they make a coxcomb of him.' Still 'the quality' flocked to the studios of Messrs. Hoppner and Lawrence, and the rival easels were long adorned with the most fashionable faces of the day.
VII.
For twenty years Lawrence reigned alone. After the final defeat of Napoleon, the artist was commissioned by the Regent to attend the congress of sovereigns at Aix-la-Chapelle, and produce portraits of the principal persons engaged in the great war. These European portraits—twenty-four in number—now decorate the Waterloo Hall at Windsor. In 1815 he was knighted by the Regent; in addition he was admitted to the Academy of St. Luke in Rome, and became in 1817 a member of the American Academy of the Fine Arts, an honour he repaid by painting and presenting to the Academy a portrait of their countryman Benjamin West. The Academies of Venice, Florence, Turin, and Vienna subsequently added his name to their roll of members, while, through the personal interposition of King Christian Frederick, he was presented with the diploma of the Academy of Denmark. He was nominated a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in France, George IV. giving him permission to wear the cross of the order. Charles X. further presented the painter with a grand French clock nearly two feet high, and a dessert service of Sèvres porcelain, which Sir Thomas bequeathed to the Royal Academy. From the Emperor of Russia he received a superb diamond ring of great value; from the King of Prussia a ring with his Majesty's initials, F.R., in diamonds. He also received splendid gifts from the foreign ministers assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle, and from the Archduchess Charles and Princess Metternich at Vienna; from the Pope a ring and a colosseum in mosaic with his Holiness's arms over the centre of the frame; from the Cardinal Gonsalvi, besides other presents, a gold watch, chain, and seals of intaglios, and many beautiful bon-bon boxes of valuable stones set in gold; gold snuff-boxes, etc.; a breakfast set of porcelain from the Dauphin in 1825, with magnificent casts and valuable engravings from Canova at Rome. Was ever painter so fêted and glorified! And then he had been, on the death of West, in 1820, elected to the presidentship of the Academy. 'Well, well,' said Fuseli, who growled at everything and everybody, but was yet a friend to Lawrence, 'since they must have a face-painter to reign over them, let them take Lawrence; he can at least paint eyes!' In 1829, he exhibited eight portraits; but his health was beginning to decline. He died on the 7th June 1830. He had been painting on the previous day another portrait of George IV. in his coronation-dress.
'Are you not tired of those eternal robes? asked some one.
'No,' answered the painter; 'I always find variety in them—the pictures are alike in outline, never in detail. You would find the last the best.'