painter of the first class.

Michelangelo had impressed him deeply. In later days he never lost an opportunity of advising students to sit at the feet of the great master, and the influence of the work in the Sistine Chapel may be noted in the famous picture of Mrs. Siddons, now to be seen in the Dulwich Gallery. Ludovico Caracci and Guido had given him hints that were of infinite value in the moulding of his technique; for colour he had gone to Titian, Tintoretto, and Rubens, of whom the last named was beginning to lose his appeal in the last years of Reynolds’ life. Sir Joshua had a supreme facility for taking from every artist the best that was in him, melting it in the crucible of his own thought, and applying the product to his pictures. There is no doubt that the sixteenth-century Venetians impressed Reynolds as much as they impressed Ruskin at a later date, but in the middle of the eighteenth century the school of Bologna was in the ascendant in England, and it is through Reynolds’ actions rather than his words that we see how Venice had influenced him. Sir Walter Armstrong thinks that Reynolds lived well rather than wisely in Italy, and that when he came back to town his wild oats were all sown, but it is hard to find any justification for the belief that Reynolds was at any time of his life a free liver. The pleasures of the table may have claimed him when he reached middle age; indeed, Dr. Johnson said to him on one occasion, “You complain about the tea I drink, but I do not count the glasses you empty,” or words to that effect. As far as other forms of dissipation go, there is no evidence that Reynolds was ever a victim to them. He was always perfect master of his self-control, and when the years had toned down certain faults of thought and manner, he became mellowed, like old wine, and not less stimulating.

Students of the famous discourses that Sir Joshua addressed annually to the Royal Academy after he became first President of the new institution, may be justified if they suspect that the great painter adopted the same rule in dealing with his students that skilled musical composers use when dealing with their pupils. A musican knows that the laws of harmony and counterpoint are not fixed, that the musical horizon widens year by year, and that rules may often be disregarded by a composer who has something to say; but, in order that composition may grow from some definite form, it is necessary that the rules should be mastered before they are disregarded. So in dealing with things of art, Reynolds said much to his audience that his own practice did not bear out. He would not hint at his own preferences quite so frankly as his canvases did and it is not at all unlikely that he realised as well as we do, that while students, like the poor, are always with us, great artists are few and far between, and will survive all academic limitations.

When Reynolds came back to England in 1752, he went down to Devonshire to recruit his health. While his sojourn abroad had been productive of so much that had been invaluable to him, he had met with two unfortunate accidents. In Minorca he had fallen from his horse and sustained injuries that had left his face scarred for all time. In the Vatican he had sustained a chill that brought about the deafness destined to be a life-long infirmity. So he took holiday in the county he loved so well, and after his return he opened a studio in St. Martin’s Street, acting on the advice of his friend and patron, Lord Edgcumbe. There was no period of weary waiting. Thanks to the quality of his work and the patronage granted so freely, he began at once to enjoy the success that belongs to the popular portrait painter. A little later he moved to Great Newport Street, where the accommodation was better suited to the growing claims of sitters, and in 1760 he went to 47 Leicester Square, now an auction-house, where he lived for the remainder of his life. As he moved he raised his prices, but nobody seemed to mind. Everybody who was anybody, paid cheerfully. So did some of the other people.

Many artists remain painters all their lives. Meet them in a studio or at a private view and they are illuminating; talk about another lying outside their immediate interests and they are dumb, or worse, for some talk without saying anything, as though they were mere politicians. Perhaps we have no right to complain of this lack of mental dimensions, but it is permissible to note with pleasure the few cases in which an artist reveals himself as an accomplished man of the world. Reynolds would never have been content to be nothing more than a painter, and he chose his friends so wisely that the living served him as well as the dead. If the great artists of Italy had shed light upon his path in one direction, what did he not owe to the men of his own generation, whose society must have been a source of inspiration to any intelligent man? Dr. Johnson himself could only have been inspiring company, even though we may think in our heart of hearts that the benefit of the inspiration was not without serious drawbacks. Reynolds enjoyed also the intimate friendship of Garrick, Goldsmith, Gibbon, and Burke, he consorted with many other men who made some mark in the world of thought, and in this atmosphere the extraordinary receptivity of his mind must have served him to great advantage. He had human weaknesses to live down, and it is to his credit that he conquered all or most of them. Like so many honest Englishmen, there was a touch of the snob about him—witness his correspondence with Lord Edgcumbe during the first visit to the Continent. He was not without jealousy, as may be seen from his pettish condemnation of the work of Liotard, the miniature painter and pastellist, and his references to Gainsborough and Romney, whose success and accomplishments galled him not a little. He was vulgar, until he learned refinement from the distinguished people with whom he was brought into contact—witness the gilded coach and gaudy liveries he bought when he established himself in Leicester Square, the coach in which his unfortunate sister Frances was compelled to drive in order that the man in the street might stare open-mouthed and talk about her brother. There is hardly a “Lion Comique,” or a lady of the music halls drawing prime minister’s salary for songs blatant or obscene, who would commit such an offence to-day, and against these lapses from taste Sir Joshua’s acquaintance with the best minds of his day failed to save him. Perhaps the atmosphere of Leicester Square in the eighteenth, as in the twentieth, century was a little theatrical. Of course the faults of a man and the merits of his work are distinct and stand apart from one another, but we are too apt to look at Reynolds the man in the light of Goldsmith’s