among the works of lesser men in Padua, Turin, Milan, and Paris. He had learned enough in England to call the old masters to his aid on the Continent, he could appreciate all their canvases could tell him and, when he returned home in his thirtieth year, he was fully equipped to take a high place among his fellow artists and to pave the way to a supremacy that only Gainsborough and Romney could challenge. He had not come unscathed through more than three years of foreign travel, a fall from his horse in the island of Minorca left his face permanently scarred. Far more serious was the chill contracted in the Vatican that brought about the deafness from which he suffered for the rest of his life. He reached Devonshire in the autumn of 1752, took a brief holiday there, and then, on the advice of his patron Lord Mount Edgecumbe, decided to try his fortune in London. Some of his biographers say he went to Great Newport Street, but it is more correct to say that his first studio was in St Martin's Street, from which he moved to Great Newport Street, staying there till 1760, when he made his last change to 47 Leicester Square, a house still standing and largely devoted to auction rooms to-day. -------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: Age of Innocence] _Age of Innocence_ (_National Gallery_) This delightful study of a little barefooted girl, wearing a white dress and seated on the grass, was bought for the Nation at the sale of Mr Harman's pictures. It has been engraved by S. W. Reynolds, Chas. Turner, and others, but the sitter has not been traced. -------------------------------------------------------------------- One of his first London portraits was a full length study of his sailor friend Keppel, and that piece of work seems to have been the foundation of his London fortunes; he never looked back. Soon the studio was crowded; one sitter succeeded another; the painter had no time to do more than work. His household affairs were watched by his sister Frances, who does not appear to have been an ideal housekeeper when the work of the house grew and it became necessary to entertain and be prepared to receive friends at any reasonable hour. The painter grew rich rapidly, and when he moved, in 1760, to the house in Leicester Square, sister Frances would drive about the town in a gilded coach with coachman and footman in staring liveries. Presumably the equipage served to advertise the painter's prosperity.