About the Portrait of Samuel Johnson

The home page portrait is electronically reproduced by the courtesy of its owner and steward Loren Rothschild. The materials below also are abstracted from his keepsake for the Johnsonians and the Samuel Johnson Society of Southern California on the occasion of their joint meeting in Los Angeles, 20 September 2002.

From: Loren Rothschild, Blinking Sam: The True History of Sir Joshua Reynolds's 1775 Portrait of Samuel Johnson

According to Hester Lynch (Thrale) Piozzi, when Sir Joshua Reynolds painted Samuel Johnson showing him as near-sighted, Johnson was displeased and told her "he would not be known by posterity for his defects only, let Sir Joshua do his worst." When Mrs. Piozzi replied "that Reynolds had no such difficulties about himself, and that he might observe the picture which hung up in the room where we were talking, represented Sir Joshua holding his ear in his hand to catch the sound," Johnson responded that Reynolds "may paint himself as deaf if he chuses . . . but I will not be blinking Sam." The painting of Samuel Johnson by his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds that so displeased the subject has ever since been known as the blinking Sam portrait.

The painting may have been commissioned and paid for by Anthony Malone (1700-1776), Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland and Edmund's uncle. Edmund Malone did himself did not arrive in London until 1777 and would not have known Johnson at the time Reynolds painted him as blinking Sam. Edmund Malone, though, certainly owned the painting at the time of his death in 1812, when he bequeathed it to his elder brother Richard, Lord Sunderlin, from whom it went by descent to the Reverend Thomas Richard Rooper, the nephew of Lord Sunderlin's wife. Thomas Rooper left the painting to his son, the Reverend William Henry Rooper, who sold it together with other paintings, including a self-portrait by Reynolds, to Thomas Agnew on 19 April 1883 for £3000. A few days later, Agnew sold the Johnson portrait and the Reynolds self-portrait for £1312.10 each to the Earl of Roseberry. Agnew reacquired the Johnson portrait on 15 December 1891 and sold it to Lord Iveagh (formerly Sir Ernest Guinness) for £2887.10, and it remained in the Guinness family until 10 July 1953, when, upon the death of the Hon. Arthur Ernest Guinness, it was sold for £3,465 by Christie, Manson & Woods, Ltd. to Messrs Barclay & Perkins, Ltd., the predecessor of the brewer Courage Ltd. Courage held it until the company was acquired by The Hanson Trust, from whom the current owner purchased it in february 1982.

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The blinking Sam painting is on canvas and measures 30 x 24 7/8 inches. There are no known copies of the portrait by Reynolds. It was engraved by John Hall for the frontispiece to the first edition of Johnson's works and for the Life of Johnson by Sir John Hawkins. Several nineteenth-century engravings either based on Reynolds's paintings or on the copies by Frances Reynolds, Gilbert Stuart, or Theophila Palmer have illustrated magazines and books. More recently blinking Sam has illustrated several scholarly works on or relating to Samuel Johnson. The painting was exhibited at the South Kensington Museum in 1867, the Royal Academy in 1883, at the birthplace in Lichfield in 1959, at Plymouth in 1973, and most recently (in 1984) at the Art Council of Great Britain's exhibition celebrating the bicentary of Samuel Johnson's death.

Samuel Johnson need not have been distressed by his friend's portrait of him. Posterity knows him not as blinking Sam but as the person for whom an important era in English literature is named. Others who have seen the portrait (and are probably better art critics than Johnson) have thought that Reynolds's portrait captures Johnson's character very well. The late Fritz Liebert aptly observed of the portrait that "Johnson seems to be devouring the book, and that is how he read; one of his friends said, 'He gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears out the heart of it.'"

A former owner, the Reverend Rooper, may be forgiven this prideful description of the painting: "The Head of Dr. Johnson is very fine, and [is] the only portrait that gives any adequate idea of the intellect of the man." John Wain, novelist, poet, and Johnson biographer has, perhaps, the best response to the painting:

In 1775 Reynolds painted Johnson again; this time the Johnson of the Streatham years, the mature critic of literature and society. Like the first portrait [1756/57] showing him working; not sitting at a desk producing a daily stint of words but holding up to his fierce, nearsighted gaze a book that in the rapture of attention he is grasping and forcing out of shape, the covers back to back (it will never be the same again). Once again one notices the hands: large, strong, actively participating in the thrust towards knowledge and ideas, as if wisdom were a juice that could be literally squeezed out of dry paper and ink.

[Loren Rothschild]     

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