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In the late eighteenth century the “fancy” figure developed as a genre of painting. These figures were meant to be picturesque renderings of children, such as girls selling flowers, boys engaged in chores, or old men whose physiognomy suggests either their faith or their defiance of death. Often such pictures had a moralizing undercurrent. Johnson did a few such figures, sometimes European figures dressed in quaint local costumes but in keeping with his times he moved toward realism. —PH

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