With the great painters of the Renaissance, nobility, grandeur, and general perfection of form and expression, though necessarily implying a certain grace in demeanour, altogether dwarfed the feature of grace of pose. In the seventeenth century, grace was subordinated to dignity of form in the case of Van Dyck and Velasquez, and to actual life experience with Rubens and Rembrandt. When either of these last two added a quality of form to their figures, it was always dignity and not grace. Murillo was the first Spanish painter to pay particular attention to the grace of his figures, but he never gave it predominance. The French masters of the period, Le Brun, Le Sueur, Poussin, Mignard, and Rigaud, leaned too closely to classical traditions to permit of grace playing a leading part in their designs, though some of slightly lesser fame as Noel and Antoine Coypel, appeared to attribute considerable value to the quality. It was during this century in Italy that grace first appeared as a prominent feature in figure painting. In his pastoral and classical scenes, Albani seems to have largely relied upon it for his beauty, and Cignani, Andrea Sacchi, Sassoferrato, and others followed in his footsteps in this respect, though up to the end of the century no attempt was made in portraiture to sacrifice other features to grace of pose. Rosalba then made her appearance as a portraitist, and she was the first to rest the entire beauty of her work on sensorial charm of feature and grace of pose. She developed a weakened school in France which culminated with Nattier; and in England, Angelica Kauffmann, and some miniature painters, notably Cosway and Humphrey, took up her system for their life-size portraits, while many artists "in small" as Cipriani and Bartolozzi, assisted in forming a cult of the style. But of the greater British painters, only Romney gave high importance to grace of pose in portraits of women. It is safer for an artist to eschew grace of pose altogether than to sacrifice higher qualities to it. A little added dignity is always preferable to a graceful attitude in a portrait, because in nature it is not so evanescent a feature. Grace is a good assisting quality, but an inferior substitute.