daughter of James Watson, who was born in Ireland in 1740, and died in London in 1790—one of the most eminent mezzotint engravers of the British school, not to be confounded with Thomas Watson (1743-1775), another eminent mezzotinter. She engraved both in mezzotint and in stipple. Her portrait in stipple of The Hon. Mrs. Stanhope after Reynolds, not in first state, brings over £5, and a colour print of the same sells for £18. The portrait of the Princess of Wales was engraved by W. Ridley in 1797, after a drawing by W. H. Brown. The third illustration, The Sisters—Mrs. Stourbridge and Mrs. Wilmot-Bromley—is typical of the wealth of fine work in stipple to be found in the "Keepsake" and other gift books of early Victorian days. Many of these portraits were after Sir Thomas Lawrence, Beechey, and others; they are all executed with great delicacy, there is a certain insipidity and an over-exaggerated softness about them which is in striking contrast to the copper-plate portraits in line in magazines of some eighty years before. This loss of the rugged personality of the originals is noticeable in the comparison of seventeenth-century line engravings after contemporary portraits with engravings of the same subjects done on steel after 1820. But after all, one does not expect strength from stipple, and these delicately limned portraits are in metal what Cosway and Plimmer's work is in the world of miniaturists. They suggest in their sentimental refinement the Amelia Sedleys of the beginning of last century.
The early days of stipple carry one back to the
