His success aroused a strong faith and a new interest in the native art of England, which showed their results in the establishment of the Royal Academy of Arts. A little more than four years after Hogarth's death, this Academy was founded by King George III. The original members of the Academy numbered thirty-four, and among them was JOSHUA REYNOLDS, who afterward became its first president. His father, Samuel Reynolds, was the rector of a grammar school at Plympton, in Devonshire, and in that little hamlet, on July 16, 1723, was born Joshua, the seventh of eleven children. When Joshua was but a mere child, his father was displeased to find him devoted to drawing; on a sketch which the boy had made, his father wrote: "This is drawn by Joshua in school, out of pure idleness." The child found the "Jesuit's Treatise on Perspective," and studied it with such intelligence that before he was eight years old he made a sketch of the school and its cloister which was so accurate that his astonished father exclaimed, "Now this justifies the author of the 'Perspective' when he says that, by observing the laws laid down in his book, a man may do wonders; for this is wonderful!" When about twelve years old, Joshua, while in church, made a sketch upon his thumb-nail of the Rev. Thomas Smart. From this sketch, he painted his first picture in oils; his canvas was a piece of an old sail, his colors were common ship-paint, and he did his work in a boathouse on Cremyll Beach. In 1740, when Joshua was seventeen years old, his father tried to carry out his plan to apprentice him to a druggist, but the boy was greatly opposed to this. He said, "I would prefer to be an apothecary rather than an _ordinary_ painter; but if I could be bound to an eminent master, I should choose that." Fortunately Lord Edgecumbe and other friends advised the boy's father in his favor, and so Joshua was finally sent to London and bound to Thomas Hudson, then the best portrait painter in England. After two years, Hudson suddenly dismissed the youth from his studio, though his agreement was for four years; the master said that Joshua neglected his orders, but others believed Hudson to be jealous of his pupil's success. Joshua returned to Devonshire and settled at Plymouth, five miles from his home. There he painted about thirty portraits of the principal persons of the neighborhood, at the price of three guineas each. One of these portraits, painted in 1746, was shown to him thirty years later, when he lamented that his progress in all that time had been so little. At the home of his friend, Lord Edgecumbe, he had formed a friendship with the young Commodore Keppel, who in 1749 was ordered to the Mediterranean. He invited Reynolds to sail with him as his guest, and, the invitation being accepted, the painter did not return to England until the end of 1752. He visited Portugal, Spain, Algiers, Minorca, Italy, and France.