To the author of this work, Jonathan Richardson the elder, some slight tribute is due in speaking of the formation and development of the English School of Painting, so far at all events as it was influenced by the study of the Italian Masters. Horace Walpole considered him one of the best painters of a head that had appeared in this country. “There is strength, roundness, and boldness in his colouring,” he says, “but his men want dignity and his women grace. The good sense of the nation is characterised in his portraits. You see he lived in an age when neither enthusiasm nor servility were predominant.” The treatise of Richardson in which Reynolds formed his first acquaintance with the Italian Masters was probably the “Essay on the whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting,” which was published in 1719, bound up in one volume with “An Argument in behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur.” This was followed, in 1722, by an account of some of the statues, bas-reliefs, drawings, and pictures in Italy, &c., with remarks by Mr. Richardson, Senior and Junior. The son made the journey, and from his notes they both compiled this valuable work. The father formed a large collection of the drawings of Old Masters, many of which were acquired and treasured by Reynolds. When he was eighteen years old, Reynolds was sent to London to study painting under Thomas Hudson, the most successful portrait painter at that [Illustration: MISS BOWLES 1775 Wallace Collection, London] time, with whom he remained for two years. It is said that the relations between master and pupil were not very happy, and that the reason for Reynolds’s abrupt return to Devonshire was the success of one of his portraits which had been hung by accident among Hudson’s productions. However this may be, it appears that Reynolds had not wasted his time in London, and it was during the next two or three years, when he had returned to his native country and settled at Plymouth, that he painted the portrait of himself (with his palette in his left hand, shading his eyes with his right), besides being commissioned to paint Miss Chudleigh, afterwards the notorious Duchess of Kingston, and the Commissioner of Plymouth Dock. Northcote speaks of Reynolds’s pictures at this early period as being “carelessly drawn and frequently in commonplace attitudes, like those of his old master Hudson, with one hand hid in the waistcoat, and the hat under the arm--a very favourite attitude with portrait painters at that time, because particularly convenient to the artist, as by it he got rid of the tremendous difficulty of painting the hand.” Apropos of which Northcote proceeds to relate an anecdote which he says he had heard so often and on such authority that he apprehended it to be a truth: