Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/42

 22 as the president, at the dinners of the royal academy. He was a friend to men of letters and a liberal patron of the arts and it was through the advice of Reynolds that he bought many of the pictures which formed his collection.

The two friends went for an art tour on the continent in the summer of 1781. Their movements are chronicled by many hands. They left London for Margate in a post chaise at 8 o'clock on the morning of Tuesday 24 July, shipped for Ostend at 4 p.m. on Thursday, and after visiting Ghent arrived at Brussels at 12 on the night of 29 July. Two days later they dined at Mr. Fitzherbert's "with the duke of Richmond and Mr. Lennox and we all behaved very well" but Reynolds left that city with the impression that their host could have done more for them. They supped at lady Torrington's on Wednesday, August 1st and next day they left for Malines; after one night the two went to Antwerp, where they passed several days. Metcalfe informed Malone that Sir Joshua spent several hours in the churches at Antwerp in seeing and examining the works of Rubens, "returning to them again and again."

On parting from those attractive pictures they visited Dordrecht, Rotterdam, the Hague, Leyden and Amsterdam, where they saw many collections, and entered Germany by crossing the Rhine near Dusseldorf. In its gallery, then probably the best collection in Europe, John Thomas Stanley the future baron Stanley of Alderley, a boy of about 15 years old travelling with a tutor, caught a glimpse of them together and recorded the fact for posterity, "Sir Joshua Reynolds being with Mr. Metcalfe, a friend of my father's, and sir Joshua sitting close to a window, pointing out a picture for Mr. Metcalfe to look at." To this gallery they paid frequent visits and Reynolds bears printed testimony to the services rendered by Lambert Kraye, the president of the academy, to the students copying in its rooms. The other places