When the Royal Academy was formed in Seventeen Hundred Sixty-eight, Reynolds was made its president, and this office he held until the close of his life.  He was not one of the chief promoters of the Academy at the beginning, and the presidency was half forced upon him.  He might have declined the honor then had the King not made him a knight, and showed that it was his wish that Reynolds should accept.  Sir Joshua, however, had more ballast in his character than any other painter of his time, and it was plain that without his name at the head the Academy would be a thing for smiles and quiet jokes.

The thirty-four charter members included the names of two Americans, Copley and West, and of one woman, Angelica Kauffman.

And it is here worthy of note that although the Methodist Church still refuses to allow women to sit as delegates in its General Conference, yet, in Seventeen Hundred Sixty-eight, no dissent was made when Joshua Reynolds suggested the name of a woman as a member of the Royal Academy.

Sir Joshua did not forget his friends at the time honors were given out, for he secured the King’s permission to add several honorary members to the Academy—­men who couldn’t paint, but who still expressed themselves well in other ways.

Doctor Johnson was made Professor of Ancient Literature; Oliver Goldsmith, Professor of Ancient History; and Richard Dalton, Librarian.

In this case the office did not seek the man:  the man was duly measured, and the office manufactured to fit him.

When Sir Joshua died, in February, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-two, it was the close of a success so uninterrupted that it seems unequaled in the history of art.  He left a fortune equal to considerably more than half a million dollars; he had contributed valuable matter to the cause of literature; he had been the earnest friend of all workers in the cause of letters, music and art; and had also been the intimate adviser and confidant of royalty.  He was generous and affectionate, wise and sincere; a cheerful and tireless worker—­one in whom the elements were so well mixed that all the world might say, This was a man!

LANDSEER

The man behind his work was seen through it—­sensitive, variously gifted, manly, genial, tender-hearted, simple and unaffected; a lover of animals, children and humanity; and if any one wishes to see at a glance nearly all we have written, let him look at Landseer’s portrait, painted by himself, with a canine connoisseur on either side.

    —­Monkhouse

[Illustration:  LANDSEER]

Happy lives make dull biographies.  Young women with ambitions should be very cautious lest mayhap they be caught in the soft, silken mesh of a happy marriage, and go down to oblivion, dead to the world.

“Miss Pott—­the beautiful Miss Pott,” they called her.  The biographers didn’t take time to give her first name, nor recount her pedigree, so rapt were they with her personality.  They only say, “She was tall, willowy and lissome; and Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her picture as a peasant beauty, bearing on her well-poised head a sheaf of corn.”