Joshua Reynolds was born at Plympton in Devonshire on the 16th July 1723; the son of the Rev. Samuel Reynolds and his wife Theophila Potter. He was on every side connected with the Church, for both his father and his grandfather were in holy orders, his mother was the daughter of a clergyman, and his maternal grandmother also. His father's elder brother, too, was a clergyman, a fellow of Eton College and Canon of St. Peter's, Exeter. So that here, as in Italy, we start with a basis of religion. The young artist's first essays were made in copying several little things done by his elder sisters, and he afterwards took great delight in copying such prints as he met with in his father's books, particularly those in Plutarch's _Lives_, and in Jacob Cats's _Book of Emblems_, which his great-grandmother by his father's side, a Dutch woman, had brought from Holland. When he was only eight years old he read with great avidity a book called _The Jesuits Perspective_, an architectural, not a religious work, and made himself so completely master of it that he never afterwards had occasion to study any other treatise on the subject. In fact, a drawing which he then made of Plympton School so filled his father with wonder that he said to him, "Now this exemplifies what the author of the _Perspective_ says in his preface--that by observing the rules laid down in his book a man may do wonders, for this is wonderful!" From these attempts he proceeded to draw likenesses of his friends and relations with tolerable success. But what most strongly confirmed him in his love of the art was Richardson's _Treatise on Painting_, the perusal of which so delighted and inflamed his mind, that Raphael appeared to him superior to the most illustrious names of ancient or modern times--a notion which he loved to indulge all the rest of his life. Before he was eighteen years old his father placed him as a pupil with Thomas Hudson, who was then the most distinguished portrait-painter in England; but having some disagreement with his master, the young man returned to Devonshire, where he practised portrait painting with more or less success until in 1749 he accompanied Admiral Keppel to the Mediterranean, and remained for two or three years studying the old masters in Italy.