Joshua Reynolds was born at Plympton in Devonshire in the month of July 1723. His father, the Rev. Samuel Reynolds, master of the local grammar school, was a scholar, and gave his boy the best education at his command, intending to make him a doctor when he grew up. But the lad's talent developed early, his hands were busy with the pencil at a very early age, and at a time when to most lads reading is a labour rather than a pastime, he was mastering the elements of perspective and studying a "Theory of Painting" by one Richardson. This precocious interest in art was not to be overlooked, and the Rev. Samuel Reynolds giving up the idea of the medical profession for his son, sent him in his seventeenth year to London as pupil to a portrait painter named Thomas Hudson, a man of some temporary repute. He stayed there for three years, and then a series of troubles with his master culminated in a final quarrel, and the boy, for he was hardly more, left London for his native county, and set up in Devonport as a portrait painter. His gift was already sufficient to gain recognition, and the patronage of local people was neither denied nor delayed. Among them was Lord Mount Edgecumbe, who was not content to have his portrait painted, but, being convinced that the young artist had talent, did all that in him lay to help its development. Portraits were painted in large numbers at Devonport, many are known to-day, but for the most part they are not classed with the master's great achievements. A natural gift and three years' association with Thomas Hudson could not make the Reynolds we know and admire. It was for Italy to do this and Lord Mount Edgecumbe made Italy possible by introducing his protégé to Commodore Keppel, a distinguished sailor, who, on receiving a Mediterranean command in 1749, invited his clever friend to accompany him. Naturally the offer was not slighted; by the summer of 1749 the young painter was in the Eternal City copying masterpieces. But he did not copy in any slavish fashion; it was his firm belief, and one he was to expound to students in days to come, that copying is a delusive industry and keeps the gifts of composition and invention dormant, so that for lack of proper exercise they lose their vitality. His mind was at once synthetical and analytical; he set himself to discover the foundation of the excellence of the masterpieces, and many of his copies were in a sense mere notes for his own future guidance. He wanted assistance to develop himself; he had no wish to speak in the language of any of the mighty dead. Yet his power of making an effective copy must have been remarkable. Sir Walter Armstrong, to whose life of Reynolds reference has been made already, thinks that one of the Rembrandts in our National Gallery is no more than the copy by Sir Joshua of an original. For three years the painter laboured diligently, not only among the Michelangelos in Rome, but