career of the greatest of our English
portrait-painters.

During the next four years Joshua remained
with his father, by whom he was educated, and
when he was seventeen years old the question
at home was, whether he should be an Apothecary
or a Painter. Joshua himself said on the
matter, that " he would rather be an apothecary
than an ordinary painter; but if he could be
bound to an eminent master he should choose
the latter." Mr. Hudson, the portrait-painter,
Richardson's pupil and son-in-law, a Devonshire
man, and then the chief portrait-painter in
England, was in the habit of coming to Bideford,
and was expected there in about two months.
Joshua's father wrote, therefore, upon the
matter to a friend at Bideford, Mr. Cutcliffe,
the attorney. Could Mr. Hudson be asked to
look at some of Joshua's work, or Joshua go to
Bideford and see him? Mr. Cutcliffe managed
the matter for his friend, and Joshua Reynolds
went to London as Hudson's apprentice, a
premium of one hundred and twenty pounds
being raised for the purpose, half of it lent
by one of his married sisters. The old schoolmaster
was delighted to see his artist son so
well launched in the profession of his choice,
and that a worthy one. " You have done me,"
he wrote to his friend Cutcliffe, "a favour fit
for a man of a thousand a year." Joshua wrote
home delighted with his work, his master, every-
thing, and said, " While I am doing this, I am
the happiest creature alive."

While Hudson's apprentice, Reynolds was
sent to make a purchase for his master at a
picture sale, where Pope came into the room. His
name was whispered, way was made for him,
hands were held out to touch him as he passed
along, bowing to the company on either side.
Reynolds put out his hand under the arm of the
person who stood before him, and shook hands
with the famous poet, whom he described afterwards
as " about four feet six inches high; very
humpbacked and deformed. He wore a black
cloak, and, according to the fashion of that time,
had on a little sword. He had a large and very
fine eye, and a long, handsome nose; his mouth
had those peculiar marks which are always
found in the mouths of crooked persons, and
the muscles which run across the cheek were
so strongly marked that they seemed like small
cords."

Though bound to Hudson for four years,
Reynolds did not remain with him two. The
cause of separation is not clearly known; if a
quarrel, it was not a serious one. Reynolds
went back to Devonshire, and began at once to
paint portraits at Plymouth Dock for three
guineas apiece. He got a fair number of
customers, including the great man of the place,
the Commissioner of the Dockyard. But he
was soon in London again, where Hudson, his
old master, was very kind to him. After he
had been in town a couple of years, he painted,
when his age was three-and-twenty, a portrait
of Captain Hamilton, the father of the Marquis
of Abercorn, which brought him into some
notice. But at the close of that year, seventeen
'forty-six, he was summoned to Plympton, to
the death-bed of his father, who died on
Christmas-day. The family had then to leave the
schoolhouse. His mother was already dead, and
Joshua, quitting London, took a house at
Plymouth Dock, where he lived for the next three
years with his two unmarried sisters. While he
lived thus in Devonshire, Reynolds saw pictures
by William Gandy, of Exeter, the son of a painter
who had been a pupil and close imitator of
Vandyke. The younger Gandy had a style of his
own, said to be " peculiar, solemn, and forcible,"
and Reynolds had learnt just enough while with
Hudson to be able to profit by the sight of works
like Gandy's, which influenced him far more
than any teachings of his rather common-place
although successful master. One saying of
Gandy's Reynolds remembered, and applied to
his own practice as a painter, that " a picture
ought to have a richness in its texture, as if the
colours had been composed of cream or cheese,
and the reverse of a hard and husky or dry
manner."

To the patronage of Reynolds by the Edgcumbe
family—the family of which son Dick had set
him upon painting in the boat-house his first
portrait in oil colour—the young artist owed
his visit to Italy. When Reynolds was still
with his sisters at Plymouth, Augustus Keppel,
the famous Admiral Keppel of after years, was
a fine young sailor, four-and-twenty years old,
two years younger than Reynolds, with a
diplomatic mission to the Barbary States, and
command in the Mediterranean with the rank of
commodore. On his way out, he put in at
Plymouth for repairs, because his ship had
sprung her topmasts. To that accident, as the
course of his life ran, Reynolds owed much of
his subsequent prosperity. Only it is a mistake
to suppose that prosperity comes of the accidents
that seem to bring it. Given the temper and
the mind capable of prospering, if it be not one
small incident it will be another that serves as
high-water mark upon that tide in the affairs of
men which, taken at the flood, leads on to
fortune. Sometimes there is the temper without
the mind, sometimes there is the mind without
the temper, necessary to a high success.
Reynolds had both the requisites, and that in a
remarkable degree.

When young Keppel put into Plymouth, he
visited his friend Lord Edgcumbe, and Reynolds,
who had made Lord Edgcumbe his friend, met
Keppel, who found his companionship so agreeable
that he offered to take him on board his
ship, carry him to the Mediterranean, and land
him in Italy. Reynolds, delighted with the
offer, borrowed in his family the means for his
Italian art tour, and, sailing with Keppel, as his
guest, saw Lisbon, and Cadiz, Gibraltar, Tetuan,
and Algiers, became a guest of the governor-
general, Blakeney at Minorca, where he
replenished his purse by painting almost all the
officers in garrison; and, by a fall down a precipice
when out riding, got the cut on his upper
lip which left a scar visible for the rest of his