James Boswell

Reynolds painted this in 1785, the year after Samuel Johnson died, and it catches James Boswell at a hinge in his life. For 20 years he had been Johnson's companion and note-taker, and now, with the great man gone, he was turning those notebooks into the biography that would make him famous in 1791. Reynolds knew both men well, belonged with them to the same London dining club, and thought enough of Boswell to paint him without charging a fee. The portrait shows a confident, slightly florid gentleman rather than the anxious, self-doubting figure his own diaries reveal. Reynolds kept it for years and finally made Boswell a gift of it in 1791, the same year the Life of Johnson appeared.