It is well to remember that Sir Joshua was not a heaven-sent genius, and that he arrived at the perfection of his achievement by the addition of hard labour to a considerable natural gift. He started out with few advantages save those that come to the young man who finds a patron early in life; he had many natural errors of taste to correct. Students of his life and correspondence will find many evidences to prove that the first President of the Royal Academy mastered his self-control, taste, and bearing towards patrons as he mastered his art, slowly and not without difficulty, but that as soon as a lesson was mastered it was retained for all time. The raw country lad from Devonshire could not become all at once one of the prominent figures in the society of his time. This is as it was bound to be--the people who make no mistakes, who say and do the right thing under all circumstances, who are, so to speak, ready made and with every modern equipment, are for the most part the creation of their biographers. They have not and never had a real existence as paragons of progress and propriety. There was a time when Joshua Reynolds was not very competent, and but incompletely educated; he became highly accomplished and well read. There was a time when he exhibited the tendencies of a snob; he learned to lay them aside, and once abandoned he had no further use for them. Unceasing endeavour stimulated and refined him, he achieved greatness not for himself alone but also for British art. Before his day the most of the fashionable portrait painters were foreigners. Rubens and Van Dyck had many successors and followers though they had no peers, but after Reynolds had made his mark it was no longer considered necessary to employ foreign talent. The commanding ability of the painter was associated with the easy authority of the man of the world. Leaders of English society found that Sir Joshua, despite his deafness, was a fascinating companion. He shot and hunted with them, he ate and drank with them, he entertained them in fashion that smacked more of the country than of the town. Dr Johnson would suggest that he sometimes took more than was absolutely necessary for his well-being, but then the doctor thought that all drinking, save tea-drinking, was gross indulgence. From his close acquaintance with men of mark and women of social distinction came the intimacy that the portraits reveal, the quality that counts for so much in portraiture. There were other attractions greatly admired then and lost now, for Sir Joshua gave his pictures a fine glaze that is said to have added much to the beauty of the colouring, but was, alas, ephemeral. It was purely experimental, and when we consider the scientific resources of the middle eighteenth century it is hardly surprising to find that the charm did not endure. For all we know to the contrary this purely evanescent quality constituted one of the charms of Reynolds while he lived, but