th his father and
his grandfather were in holy orders, his mother was the daughter of a
clergyman, and his maternal grandmother also. His father's elder
brother, too, was a clergyman, a fellow of Eton College and Canon of St.
Peter's, Exeter. So that here, as in Italy, we start with a basis of
religion.

The young artist's first essays were made in copying several little
things done by his elder sisters, and he afterwards took great delight
in copying such prints as he met with in his father's books,
particularly those in Plutarch's _Lives_, and in Jacob Cats's _Book of
Emblems_, which his great-grandmother by his father's side, a Dutch
woman, had brought from Holland. When he was only eight years old he
read with great avidity a book called _The Jesuits Perspective_, an
architectural, not a religious work, and made himself so completely
master of it that he never afterwards had occasion to study any other
treatise on the subject. In fact, a drawing which he then made of
Plympton School so filled his father with wonder that he said to him,
"Now this exemplifies what the author of the _Perspective_ says in his
preface--that by observing the rules laid down in his book a man may do
wonders, for this is wonderful!"

From these attempts he proceeded to draw likenesses of his friends and
relations with tolerable success. But what most strongly confirmed him
in his love of the art was Richardson's _Treatise on Painting_, the
perusal of which so delighted and inflamed his mind, that Raphael
appeared to him superior to the most illustrious names of ancient or
modern times--a notion which he loved to indulge all the rest of his
life.

Before he was eighteen years old his father placed him as a pupil with
Thomas Hudson, who was then the most distinguished portrait-painter in
England; but having some disagreement with his master, the young man
returned to Devonshire, where he practised portrait painting with more
or less success until in 1749 he accompanied Admiral Keppel to the
Mediterranean, and remained for two or three years studying the old
masters in Italy.

As this period of Reynold's career had so determining an influence not
only on himself but on the whole course of the history of painting in
England--inasmuch as it formed the greater part of the groundwork of his
discourses when President of the Royal Academy, it is worth having an
account of it at first hand from the painter himself. "It has frequently
happened,"