idance towards the appreciation of good art, though here and there
we may not wholly assent to some passing application of them, where the
difference may be great between a fashion of thought in his time and in
ours. A righteous enforcement of exact truth in our day has led many
into a readiness to appreciate more really the minute imitation of a
satin dress, or a red herring, than the noblest figure in the best of
Raffaelle's cartoons. Much good should come of the diffusion of this
wise little book.

Joshua Reynolds was born on the 15th of July, 1723, the son of a
clergyman and schoolmaster, at Plympton in Devonshire. His bent for Art
was clear and strong from his childhood. In 1741 at the age of nineteen,
he began study, and studied for two yours in London under Thomas Hudson,
a successful portrait painter. Then he went back to Devonshire and
painted portraits, aided for some time in his education by attention to
the work of William Gandy of Exeter. When twenty-six years old, in May,
1749, Reynolds was taken away by Captain Keppel to the Mediterranean, and
brought into contact with the works of the great painters of Italy. He
stayed two years in Rome, and in accordance with the principles
afterwards laid down in these lectures, he refused, when in Rome,
commissions for copying, and gave his mind to minute observation of the
art of the great masters by whose works he was surrounded. He spent two
months in Florence, six weeks in Venice, a few days in Bologna and Parma.
"If," he said, "I had never seen any of the fine works of Correggio, I
should never, perhaps, have remarked in Nature the expression which I
find in one of his pieces; or if I had remarked it, I might have thought
it too difficult, or perhaps impossible to execute."

In 1753 Reynolds came back to England, and stayed three months in
Devonshire before setting up a studio in London, in St. Martin's Lane,
which was then an artists' quarter. His success was rapid. In 1755 he
had one hundred and twenty-five sitters. Samuel Johnson found in him his
most congenial friend. He moved to Newport Street, and he built himself
a studio--where there is now an auction room--at 47, Lincoln's Inn
Fields. There he remained for life.

In 1760 the artists opened, in a room lent by the Society of Arts, a free
Exhibition for the sale of their works. This was continued the next year
at Spring Gardens, with a charge of a shilling for admission. In 1765
they obtain