The biographers of Philip James de Loutherbourg are curiously disagreed as to the precise period of his birth. Five different writers have assigned five different dates to that occurrence: 1728, 1730, 1734, 1740, and 1741; and it has been suggested, by way of explanation of this diversity, that the painter's fondness for astrological studies may have induced him to vary occasionally the date of his birth, in order that he might indulge in a plurality of horoscopes, and in such way better the chance of his predictions being justified by the actual issue of events. He was born, at Strasbourg, the son of a miniature painter, who died at Paris in 1768. Intended by his father for the army, while his mother desired that he should become a minister of the Lutheran Church, he was educated at the College of Strasbourg in languages and mathematics. Subsequently he chose his own profession, studying under Tischbein the elder, then under Vanloo and Francesco Casanova; the latter, a painter of battle pieces after the style of Bourgognone. By his landscapes exhibited at the Louvre, De Loutherbourg acquired fame in Paris, and in 1763 was elected a member of the French Academy of Painting, being then eight years below the prescribed age for admission to that distinction, say the biographers who date his birth from 1740. Quitting France, he travelled in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, and in 1771 came to England, moved hitherward probably by the opinion then prevalent both at home and abroad, that (as Edwards puts it in his Anecdotes of Painting) 'some natural causes prevented the English from becoming masters either in painting or sculpture.' Shortly after his arrival in England he was engaged by Garrick to design and paint scenes and decorations for Drury Lane Theatre, at a salary of L500; a sum considerably larger than had been thitherto paid to any artist for such services.