"I will be a painter, if you will give me the chance of being a good one," he is said to have remarked when quite a lad, and this is but one of the simple sentences that hold and in a sense reveal the keynote of his character. Reynolds was determined to succeed. When he started his work there were few people in England who could guide him in the right way, and consequently we must not look for any great achievement in the early portraits. The painter may be said to have owed his first success to Commodore Keppel, who took him on a cruise in the Mediterranean and helped him to come into touch with the great masterpieces that will probably stimulate artists for all time. In return, the painter gave the sailor a measure of fame that his naval achievements would hardly have secured. Italy turned the dross of Reynolds' art to fine gold, and he never shrank from acknowledging the debt. Had he stayed in England he might have been a greater man than all his contemporaries, save Gainsborough and Romney, but he could not have given the world any one of the pictures that are reproduced here. Art will not yield to inspiration alone. The musician, or the literary man, with very simple education may be able to achieve wonders, but the artist who looks to brushes and colours for his medium must sacrifice diligently for many years at the shrine of technique before his hand can express what is in his brain. The years between 1749 and 1752, devoted by Reynolds to studying and copying the Vatican frescoes and the pictures of Padua, Milan, Turin, and Paris, were invaluable. Indeed he was one of the greatest copyists of his time, and Sir Walter Armstrong thinks that one of his copies of a Rembrandt is classed among the originals in the National Gallery to-day! Down to the year of the Italian journey the young painter's life had been quite uneventful. Born in 1723 at Plympton in Devonshire, where his father was a school-master, he was apprenticed in London to Thomas Hudson, a portrait painter of the day and a Devon man too. Hudson gave his pupil Guercino's drawings to copy. Before the time of apprenticeship had expired Reynolds had quarrelled with his master and gone back to Devonshire, where he painted work that was of no great importance, under the patronage of the first Lord Edgcumbe. At his house Reynolds met the Commodore Keppel, whose kindness enabled him to see Italy, and it was the sojourn in that real home of art that brought Reynolds back to England a portrait painter of the first class.