other and more enduring excellencies, he would not occupy the place he holds to-day, while on the other hand, if a Titian or a Rubens had been able to give him the secret of manipulating pigments, he would have stood side by side with the greatest masters of all time. [Illustration: PLATE VIII.--DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE AND CHILD. (Chatsworth House, Derbyshire) This picture, to which reference has been made in the text, hangs at Chatsworth, and has been reproduced by permission of His Grace the Duke of Devonshire. Although Walpole sneered at it when he saw it for the first time, the composition stands to-day among the most admired of the master's works.] Artists tell us that painting should be no more than a harmony of colour and line, that it should not attempt to cross the borderline that separates painting from literature. They are justified in their attitude, but at the same time we cannot discuss painters in terms of paint, or tell of our admiration of their work by expressing that admiration on canvas. Those of us who are not painters, can only approach art through literature, and seek to find in a man the explanation of his works, and in the works, the revelation of the man. Joshua Reynolds possessed a master mind. He had wonderful capacity for synthesis and analysis, and something akin to the skilled physician's gift of diagnosis. As soon as he had built up the foundations of his own art and found a new method of presentation, he turned all his mental capacity to the study of the people who sat for him. As soon as he had achieved technique, the other gifts that no technique could develop came into play, and then his work revealed its extraordinary qualities, side by side with the few limitations that beset his mode of life. In society, Reynolds would seem to have been courtly and reserved. He did not expand to women as he did to men, for he looked upon women and children as subjects for classical treatment. He made them extremely beautiful; he gave them graces and gifts that flatter the imagination of those who gaze upon his pictures to-day: but there are not too many portraits of women among those painted by Reynolds in which there is a large quality of humanity. He suppresses a great part of the human interest that may have been in them, and replaces it with beauty of colour and line. Now and again, of course, he is very fortunate. When he painted the great courtesans of his day, Polly Fisher, Nelly O'Brien, and others of that frail sisterhood, the qualities he omitted left the sitters quite human. There was no suggestion of the classic about them. A Nelly O'Brien at her best is just a woman, while some of the high-born ladies at their best became a little too cold, a little too stately, a little too well-posed for the wicked world they lived in. Even when we consider the famous "Jumping Baby" that hangs at Chatsworth, it is impossible to avoid the thought that if the little one