Reynolds had a room in which his copyists, his pupils, and his drapery-men worked. Among them was one of the cleverest and most unfortunate of artists. Seldom is the name of Peter Toms now heard, but he once sat in Hudson’s studio with young Reynolds, and in the studio of Sir Joshua, as the better artist’s obedient humble servant; that is to say, he painted his employer’s draperies, and probably a good deal more, for Toms was a very fair portrait-painter. Peter worked too for various other great artists, and a purchaser of any picture of that time cannot be certain whether much of it is not from Toms’s imitative hand. Peter’s lack of original power did not keep him out of the Royal Academy, though in his day he was but a second-class artist. He belonged, too, to the Herald’s Office, as the painters of the Tudor period often did, and after filling in the canvasses of his masters in England, he went to Ireland on his own account and in reliance on the patronage of the Lord-Lieutenant, the Duke of Northumberland. Toms, however, found that the Irish refused to submit their physiognomies to his limning, and he waited for them to change their opinion of him in vain. Finally, he lost heart and hope. His vocation was gone; but in the London garret within which he took refuge he seems to have given himself a chance for life or death. Pencil in one hand and razor in the other, he made an effort to paint a picture, and apparently failed in accomplishing it, for he swept the razor across his throat, and was found the next morning stark dead by the side of the work which seems to have smitten him with despair.