Sir Joshua offered to take to his home the sons of his other sister, Mrs. Johnson--he had not forgotten how these two sisters had loaned him money when he was poor--but Mrs. Johnson declined his offer, fearing the temptations of London, and being greatly opposed to her brother's habit of painting on Sundays. One son went into the church and died young; another went to India, and Reynolds took great interest in his welfare. Later, two of Mrs. Johnson's daughters lived with Sir Joshua. In 1773, he painted and exhibited "The Strawberry Girl," which represents Offy Palmer, creeping timidly along, and looking anxiously around with her great black eyes. Sir Joshua always maintained that this was one of the "half-dozen original things" which he said no man ever exceeded in his life's work. Later the picture was purchased by the Marquis of Hertford for ten thousand five hundred dollars. F. S. Pulling, of Exeter College, Oxford, says, in his Life of Sir Joshua: "What a love Reynolds had for children, childless though he was himself! What a marvellous knowledge of their ways, and, even of their thoughts! With the peer's son or the beggar's child it was the same. The most fastidious critic finds it impossible to discover faults in these child portraits; the whole soul of the painter has gone into them, and he is as much at home with the gypsy child as with little Lord Morpeth. As Mr. Stephens well observes, 'Reynolds, of all artists, painted children best ... knew most of childhood, depicted its appearances in the truest and happiest spirit of comedy, entered into its changeful soul with the tenderest, heartiest sympathy, played with the playful, sighed with the sorrowful, and mastered all the craft of infancy.... His 'Child Angels' was not painted till 1786. It consists of simply five different representations of the same face, that of Frances Gordon. The perfect loveliness of this picture is beyond dispute.... These are human faces, it is true, but can you imagine any purer, more innocent, more gentle faces?... I, for one, am perfectly content to accept these faces as those of the most lovely beings God ever created." A picture of a nymph with a young Bacchus, really the portrait of the beautiful young actress, Mrs. Hartley, "whose lovely face and lithe, tall, delicate figure had rapidly won for her the leading place at Covent Garden," is now in the possession of Mr. Bentley, who refused an offer of ten thousand dollars for it. Sir Joshua was now elected mayor of Plympton, his native town, an honor which he greatly prized; and received the degree of D. C. L. from Oxford University. Oliver Goldsmith had died, and on the day of his death Sir Joshua did not touch a pencil, "a circumstance the most extraordinary for him," says Northcote, "who passed no day without a line." He acted as executor for his dead friend, and found, to his amazement, that his debts were ten thousand dollars.