Porträt von Samuel Johnson

Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson were close friends, two of the men who founded the London dining society they simply called the Club. By 1775 Johnson was the most famous man of letters in England, the writer who had compiled the great English dictionary almost on his own. Reynolds, the leading portrait painter of the age, chose not to give him a dignified pose. He painted Johnson as he really was at close quarters: badly short-sighted, holding a book right up to his face and screwing up his eyes to read. Johnson did not thank him for it, and complained that he would not go down to posterity as, in his own phrase, Blinking Sam. The name stuck anyway. Reynolds himself was going deaf around these years and carried an ear trumpet to the same dinners.