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That modern dealers are willing to pay extravagantly for Gainsborough, Lawrence, Romney, Reynolds, is not surprising. Gentlemen of the 18th Century always understood the art of being well-kept. While they lived they were blessed with money and untormented by morals. Life was obsequious to them. Death has followed suit. Eighteenth Century painting sold well in the 18th Century. It brings better prices now because, in addition to its literary quality, its sentimentalism, its triteness and the excellence of its technical effects, there hovers over it a formal and elegant carnality which the modern mind likes to encounter. Perhaps carnality is the wrong word; perhaps you cannot apply it, for instance, to Lawrence's picture of Miss Mary Moulton Barrett for which Sir Joseph Duveen gave 74,000 guineas; perhaps you cannot call this pure and lovely miss, standing with round arms pressed to round bosoms, a storm behind her head, animation in her eyes, gauze around her legs, anything but "Pinkie."