hat Reynolds later associated with minute attention to fur and feathers in still life and genre remained during this period largely the province of foreigners, although it is said that Charles Collins deserves honourable mention. The foreign practitioners of genre showed greater capacity to assimilate from their environment than the bird and flower painters, whose subjects were broadly the same in all countries that collected specimens from overseas. A Covent Garden Group in low-life genre takes its place alongside the Thames Estuary School. Among the immigrants who painted Covent Garden scenes were Joseph Van Aken, Balthasar Nebot, Peter Angellis and Francis Paul Ferg. Vertue’s vocabulary in recording the works of the Covent garden Group include the following epithets and nouns: “natural”, “curious”, “nicety”, “exactness” and “skillfulness”. His term for painters of this class is the “lower rank of Virtuosi”. In admitting them to the class of the Virtuosi, although in a lower rank, and by his unstinted admiration of their work, Vertue shows that he is both progressive and liberal in his sympathies. His enthusiasm for the contemporary art of his own country was uncritical, but the change that he noted taking place during his lifetime were to have vital consequences. Vertue deserves credit for his acumen in detecting and describing so precisely the really significant innovations, and the extraordinary merit of his contemporaries is that they laid the foundations for the greater achievements of the next generation. They had challenged by example, if not by doctrine, the hierarchy of categories, so that when a Royal Academy committed to its restoration was founded the vitality of art was free to flow in other channels than the immitation of the Old Masters. The Classical Age of British Painting: Reynolds, Gainsborough and Wilson ...
