Samuel Johnson
Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723 to 1792) · About 1756 to 1757
Samuel Johnson sits at a table with a quill in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other, his big, heavy body turned in the chair and his eyes lifted as if he is listening to a sentence forming in his head. He wears a plain brown coat and no wig. The picture was painted around the time his Dictionary of the English Language appeared, the achievement that made him the most famous writer in Britain, and it was made by the friend who understood him best.
Reynolds met Johnson in seventeen fifty six and painted him several times, but this early portrait is the most human. Instead of the pose of a scholar showing off his books, we get a man in the middle of work, slightly dishevelled, thinking. Look at the hands, which are large and restless, and at the soft, uncertain focus of the eyes; Johnson was very short sighted and suffered from tics and twitches, and Reynolds has hinted at them without making fun. The colour is warm and simple, so that everything concentrates on the face.
The painting stayed with Reynolds and then with Johnson's friends before the gallery bought it in nineteen eleven. Johnson and Reynolds went on to found the Literary Club together, and Boswell's Life of Johnson made the doctor's conversation immortal. This portrait is the visual companion to that book, the image of a man for whom talking and writing were the same restless activity.
Did You Know? Reynolds and Johnson were close friends who founded the Literary Club together in seventeen sixty four; Johnson never sat so informally for anyone else.
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