Thomas Lawrence was born in the year 1769, when Sir Joshua Reynolds was in his forty-sixth year, and Gainsborough was two-and-forty years his senior. His father, after whom he was named, was a ne’er-do-well of decent birth and good education who had made a clandestine marriage with a lady of better social position than his own; for Lucy Read, who married Thomas Lawrence, senior, was related to the Powis family. Because she listened to his suit she was disowned and disinherited by her relations. Her influence upon her son would seem to have been wholly good; indeed he was devoted to both parents, though his father started to exploit the child’s gifts in nursery days; and his grief when the old people died was very severe. Thomas Lawrence, senior, “stiff in opinion, always in the wrong,” was “everything in turn and nothing long.” Attorney, verse-writer, actor, exciseman, and farmer, he had become a tavern-keeper when his sorely tried wife presented him with the baby who was destined to paint the portrait of Benjamin West that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, and to succeed him as President of the Royal Academy. [Illustration: PLATE III.--PORTRAIT OF MR. AND MRS. JOHN JULIUS ANGERSTEIN (In the Louvre) This work, despite one or two regrettable conventions from which the painter was never entirely free when he put more than one figure on his canvas, is of more than passing interest. Mr. Angerstein was a great collector of pictures, a wealthy man to whom the painter was often in debt. The head of Mrs. Angerstein is beautifully posed.] At a very early age little Thomas Lawrence developed a wonderful gift for making life-like sketches, and at the same time he inherited his father’s gift of recitation. Such an effective combination seemed to be too good to waste, and the elder Lawrence employed the lad to improve custom in the Bristol tavern over which he presided in his own careless fashion. Visitors were invited to hear the infant prodigy recite, or if their ears were duller than their eyes, they were invited to sit for their portraits. Doubtless this was excellent for custom, but it did not avail altogether, for the Bristol house on the great Bath Road soon passed into the hands of unsatisfied creditors, and the family moved, not without considerable private aid, to the Black Bear Inn at Devizes, then a place of importance to the coaches passing on their way to and from the west. At Devizes the boy received a little education, nothing better than a smattering, and was called upon at short intervals to exhibit his precocity. He soon found an influential and appreciative audience.