From “Lives of the Painters.”

BY what course of study he attained his skill in art, Reynolds has not condescended to tell us; but of many minor matters we are informed by one of his pupils with all the scrupulosity of biography. His study was octagonal, some twenty feet long, sixteen broad, and about fifteen feet high. The window was small and square, and the sill nine feet from the floor. His sitter’s chair moved on castors, and stood above the floor a foot and a half; he held his palettes by a handle, and the sticks of his brushes were eighteen inches long. He wrought standing, and with great celerity. He rose early, breakfasted at nine, entered his study at ten, examined designs or touched unfinished portraits till eleven brought a sitter; painted till four; then dressed and gave the evening to company.

  His table was now elegantly furnished, and round it men of genius were often found. He was a lover of poetry and poets; they sometimes read their productions at his house, and were rewarded by his approbation and occasionally by their portraits. Johnson was a frequent and a welcome guest; Percy was there too, with his ancient ballads and his old English lore; Goldsmith with his latent genius, infantine vivacity, and plum-colored coat; and Sterne with his witty and licentious conversation. Burke and his brothers were constant guests; and Garrick was seldom absent, for he loved to be where greater men were. It was honorable to this distinguished artist that he perceived the worth of such men, and felt the honor which their society shed upon him. But it stopped not here: he often aided them with his purse, nor insisted upon repayment. It has, indeed, been said that he was uncivil to Johnson, and that once, on seeing him in his study, he turned his back on him and walked out; but to offer such an insult was as little in the nature of the courtly painter as to forgive it was in that of the haughty author. Reynolds seems to have loved the company of literary men more than that of artists; he had little to learn in his profession, and he naturally sought the society of those who had knowledge to impart. They have rewarded him with their approbation; he who has been praised by Burke and who was loved by Johnson has little chance of being forgotten.

  He obtained the more equivocal approbation of Sterne, of whom he painted a very clever portrait, with the finger on the brow and the head full of thought. The author of “Tristram Shandy,” speaking of his hero’s father, says: “Then his whole attitude had been easy, natural, unforced. Reynolds himself, great and graceful as he paints, might have painted him as he sat.” The death of Sterne is said to have been hastened by the sarcastic raillery of a lady whom he encountered at the painter’s table. He offended her by the grossness of his conversation, and, being in a declining state of health, suffered, if we are to believe the story, so severely from her wit—that he went home and died. That man must be singularly sensitive whose life is at the mercy of a woman’s sarcasm: the most of us are content to live long after we are laughed at.