Hired to Depress: A Digital Scholarly Edition of William Blake's Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds' DiscoursesMain MenuWho is William Blake?Just who is William Blake? And why does his scribbling in a book matter?Who is Sir Joshua Reynolds?Important FiguresTitle PageContents of The First VolumeDedication and To the KingSome Account of the Life and Writings of Sir Joshua ReynoldsWritten by Edmond Malone, Esq.The First DiscourseBibliographyElizabeth Pottera6e9fb7ea6eda3e5063e2aee73ca5f372e99b8f3
12015-12-10T00:02:25-08:00Some Account vii9Some Account of the Life and Writings of Sir Joshua Reynoldsplain2017-01-15T23:12:46-08:00 the art; and he afterwards (as he himself informed me) eagerly copied such prints as he met with among his father’s books, par- ticularly those which were given in the translation of Plutarch’s Lives, published by Dry den. But his principal fund of imi- tation was Jacob Cats’ book of Emblems, which his great grandmother by the father’s side, a Dutch woman, had brought with her from Holland. — When he was but eight years old, he read with great avidity and pleasure THE JESUIT'S PERSPECTIVE, a book which happened to lie on the window- seat of his father’s parlour; and made him- self so completely master of it, that he never afterwards had occasion to study any other treatise on that subject.5 He then attempted to draw the School at Plympton, a building elevated on stone pillars ; and he did it so well, that his father said, “ Now this ex- emplifies what the author of the ‘Perspective' asserts in his Preface,— that, by observing