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After the death of Reynolds and the retirement of Romney, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the field of portraiture was left vacant in London at least for JOHN HOPPNER, whose name is now generally included with those of Lawrence and Raeburn among the first six portrait painters of the British School.
There is a time in the day when he is confidential. "Here is this man, Hoppner. I take it that you have bought him up at an average of a hundred pounds a picture, and that at that price most owners were fairly glad to sell. Few folks outside the art schools have ever heard of him.
The ice coming in, in the afternoon, with a degree of pressure which usually attended a northerly wind on this coast, twisted the Fury’s rudder so forcibly against a mass of ice lying under her stern that it was for some hours in great danger of being damaged, and was indeed only saved by the efforts of Captain Hoppner and his officers, who, without breaking off the men from their other occupations, themselves worked at the ice-saw.
'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!
The old King had always disliked Reynolds, and Hoppner was not well enough advised to hold his tongue on the subject of the master: worse than this, he openly accepted the patronage of the Prince of Wales, and by so doing opened the door for the admission of Lawrence as royal painter much sooner than was at all necessary.
The preference of the King and Queen for Lawrence was for a time balanced by the affection of the Prince of Wales for Hoppner; the Prince was supposed to have the best taste, and as he kept a court of his own filled with the young nobility, and all the wits of that great faction known by the name of Whig, Hoppner had the youth and beauty of the land for a time; and it cannot be denied that he was a rival in every way worthy of contending with any portrait-painter of his day.
The eighteenth century, which was to witness the magnificent and, in its own way, unequalled achievement of English art in the paintings of Reynolds, Romney, Gainsborough, Hoppner; in the engravings of Bartolozzi, Dalton, John Raphael Smith, and William Henry Ryland; in the caricatures, which we have just noted, of Bunbury, Rowlandson, and Gillray, was to open, not inappropriately, with the appearance and speedy recognition of a very individual and very characteristic genius with the pictured comedies of William Hogarth.
This rivalry continued for a time in the spirit of moderation but only for a time. Lawrence, the gentler and the smoother of the two, kept silence longest; the warm nature of Hoppner broke out at last. "The ladies of Lawrence," he said, "show a gaudy dissoluteness of taste, and sometimes trespass on moral as well as professional decorum."
But by this time another star had arisen, destined to outshine that of Hoppner; though some at that period, willing to flatter the older practitioner, called it a meteor that would but flash and disappear we allude to Lawrence.
On the 20th, a number of our new friends having been allowed upon the upper deck, an old woman named Ay=ug-g~a-lo~ok stole our cooper's punch, which she was showing to her companions alongside the Hecla just afterward, when Lieutenant Hoppner observed it, and sent her back with an escort.
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