Hogarth was the first original painter of England, and he was too original either to copy or to be copied; but he founded no school. What he did was to draw aside the curtain and show the light of nature to those who had been hitherto content to grope amid the extravagances of allegory, or the dreams of mythology. Two circumstances specially stood in the way of the progress of English art--the absence of a recognised academy, where a system of art-study could be pursued, and where rewards were offered for success; and the want of a public exhibition where painters could display their works, or learn from one another. There were no masters, properly speaking, in England, and therefore no pupils. Instead of gathering around them students on the atelier system of the Continent, painters in England had apprentices, who were employed to grind their colours, clean their brushes, and prepare their canvas. Such apprentices might become mechanical copyists of their employers. Nevertheless, such was the system under which all the pupils of all the great Italian Masters, some of whom became great masters in their turns, were trained. Several attempts to supply the want of a recognised system of art-teaching in London had been made from time to time. Sir Balthasar Gerbier had a drawing school in Whitefriars so long ago as the days of Charles I.; Van Dyck promoted studies of this kind at his house in Blackfriars; the Duke of Richmond in 1758 endeavoured to form a school at the Priory Garden, Westminster; Sir Godfrey Kneller supported an academy for drawing and painting at his house in Great Queen Street, till his death in 1723; another society existed in Greyhound Court, Arundel Street, Strand, till 1738, when the members joined the St. Martin's Lane Academy. These, like the following, were drawing and painting schools, under recognised teachers, but neither honour-bestowing, benevolent, nor representative bodies. Each pupil paid for the use of the models and premises, except those which were supplied by the Duke of Richmond to his guests. In 1724 Sir James Thornhill had opened an art academy at his house in James Street, Covent Garden; it existed till his death in 1734; he suggested to the Prime Minister, Lord Halifax, the idea of a Royal Academy. Vanderbank for a time had a school with living models in a disused Presbyterian chapel. William Shipley maintained an art academy in St. Martin's Lane for thirty years, and we know that Hogarth studied there. But none of these schools had a prescribed system of teaching. The absence of a public exhibition was felt as a great misfortune by the artists of this period. Hogarth, however, who regarded the painters of his country from a gloomy point of view, had no belief in the regenerating power of academies or paid professors.