In the case of Frank Reynolds the period of bondage was comparatively brief.  Entering at first upon a business career, he had originally no prospect, nor intention, of developing his artistic impulses.  He had scarcely, indeed, a suspicion of his own powers—­certainly no proper knowledge of their latent possibilities.  But commerce had little interest for him, and circumstances which offered an opportunity of escape combining with a happy chance which suggested a higher artistic (and monetary) value for that faculty for drawing which previously he had regarded in the light of a mere hobby, caused him to throw up his earlier plans and devote himself entirely to black-and-white illustration.

[Illustration]

There had been preparation for this, however.  The son of an artist, Frank Reynolds inherited his native talent, and this was developed in no small measure during boyhood under his father’s guidance.  It was the chief delight of Reynolds junior to “mess about” (as he himself succinctly puts it) with the palette and tools of Reynolds senior, and the licence thus permitted enabled him to discover for himself much of the rudiments of the craft of the draughtsman and painter.  More was learned from long and absorbed contemplation of his father at work.

[Illustration:  “CHACUN” WITH HIS “CHACUNE”. From “Paris and some Parisians"]

If early inclinations were of more lasting duration than is their wont, it is likely that Frank Reynolds would now be known to fame as a painter of martial types and gory battlefields.  With him the fascination which soldiers and all things military have for the boyish mind took the form of an intense eagerness to reproduce in colour and line the gay pageant of the march.  The skirl of the fife and the tattoo of the drum inspired him with a desire, not to shoulder a gun, but to seize a pencil.  There was a shop in Piccadilly where water-colour sketches of military types might frequently be seen displayed to view, and to Reynolds junior a tramp thither of several miles from the far west of London was as nothing, could he but have the ecstatic joy of gazing, with nose flattened against the window-pane, upon these transcendent works of art, for an hour or more on end.

[Illustration]

This early training, to be regarded as the sure foundation upon which the artist’s later education was to rest, owed not a little, perhaps, of its effectiveness to its casual and desultory nature.  The natural bent was allowed to reveal itself:  development was gradual, and (as it were) automatic.  Individuality was neither crushed nor cramped.  On the contrary, it was given full play, and that the work of Frank Reynolds is invested with so definite a quality of personality is due in no small degree to the special circumstances of his youthful training.