Note 580 — Chapter VI · LANDSCAPE PAINTING

These pictures of women and children are for the most part in private galleries. But no artist has been more fully and adequately represented in engravings than Reynolds. In the Print Room of the British Museum there are twelve large albums of prints after his paintings. There are also numerous reproductions in books such as Cyril Davenport’s “Mezzotints,” Lord Gower’s “Sir Joshua Reynolds,” Alfred Whitman’s “The Print Collector’s Handbook,” Gordon Goodwin’s “British Mezzotinters,” and Julia Frankau’s “Eighteenth-Century Colour-Prints.” The most important of the engravers of Reynolds’ pictures were James McArdell (1729–65), Valentine Green (1739–1813), S. W. Reynolds (1773–1835), John Raphael Smith (1752–1812) and Caroline Watson (1761?–1814). Valentine Green began in 1780 a series of Reynolds’ “Beauties of the Present Age” on the plan of Lely’s and Kneller’s “Beauties.” These engravings were originally issued at fifteen shillings each, but they have increased enormously in value. At a recent sale a proof of the “Duchess of Rutland” brought a thousand pounds, nearly five times as much as Reynolds received for the original picture (Salaman, “Old Engravers of England,” p. 138).