drapery-painter Joseph Vanhaken; and we suspect it is to Rouquet that we
owe the pleasant anecdote of the two painters who, for the sum of L800 a
year, pre-empted his exclusive and inestimable services, to the
wholesale discomfiture of their brethren of the brush. The rest shall be
told in Rouquet's words:--"The best [artists] were no longer able to
paint a hand, a coat, a background; they were forced to learn, which
meant additional labour--what a misfortune! Henceforth there arrived no
more to Vanhaken from different quarters of London, nor by coach from
the most remote towns of England, canvases of all sizes, where one or
more heads were painted, under which the painter who forwarded them had
been careful to add, pleasantly enough, the description of the figures,
stout or slim, great or small, which were to be appended. Nothing could
be more absurd than this arrangement; but it would exist still--if
Vanhaken existed."[21]

Note:

[20] Another French writer, the Abbe le Blanc, gives a depressing account
of English portraits before Vanloo came to England: "At some distance one
might easily mistake a dozen of them for twelve copies of the same original.
Some have the head turned to the left, others to the right; and this is the
most sensible difference to be observed between them. Moreover, excepting
the face, you find in all the same neck, the same arms, the same flesh, the
same attitude; and to say all, you observe no more life than design in
those pretended portraits. Properly speaking, they [the artists] are not
painters, they know how to lay colours on the canvas; but they know not how
to animate it" (_Letters on the English and French Nations, 1747_, i. 160).

[21] He died in 1749.]