Blinking Sam
Portrait of Samuel Johnson, also known as Blinking Sam, is an oil-painted portrait of English lexicographer Samuel Johnson reading, created by English artist Joshua Reynolds around 1775. The painting highlights Johnson's vision problems, which led Johnson to deride the painting and say that he would not be "Blinking Sam", as quoted in Hester Thrale's Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson. The artwork has since been noted to be the "best-known" portrait of Johnson, and became an Internet meme in 2012. The painting is located at The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, United States, where it is on display.
Background
Samuel Johnson was an English author and lexicographer, and is considered to be "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history" by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He established his literary reputation with the publication of A Dictionary of the English Language, the "first full collation of the English language". Joshua Reynolds, a close friend of Johnson, was an English portrait painter and aesthetic theorist. According to The Oxford Companion to British History, "lmost every person of note in the second half of the 18th had their portrait painted by Reynolds." Among these portraits were four of Johnson, whom Reynolds emulated and with whom he had founded the Literary Club alongside Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith.Ocular health of Johnson
Johnson had an infection in his left eye, and contracted king's evil at approximately two years of age, both of which severely affected his eyesight. His left eye was weaker than his right, although the latter had been inflamed in 1756. Various sources attest to his nearsightedness, which led Johnson to read text with the material very close to his face; however, contemporary accounts of his capacity for seeing are often contradictory, with some describing his vision as reasonably good.Composition
According to James Northcote, Reynolds' pupil and fellow painter, the painting was created in the year 1775; however, it could have been begun earlier if it is the same item recorded in a transaction in Reynolds' ledger on May 12, 1774. The oil on canvas painting in a feigned oval depicts a myopic Johnson in his signature brown coat squintingly reading an unbound book or a pamphlet bent back to front by holding it close to his face, with light falling on his face and hands. Reynolds, who was himself deaf, may have linked the portrait to an earlier self-portrait of himself cupping his ear to symbolize his disability.Johnson's reaction
According to Hester Thrale's Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, Johnson reacted negatively to the painting and rejected being depicted as "Blinking Sam". Thrale reported the following:Johnson had defined to blink as "to see obscurely" in his dictionary, in which he quoted Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice to provide an example of the word: "What's here! the portrait of a blinking ideot." Johnson may have remembered the quote when he reacted to the portrait.
Northcote wrote in The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds that Reynolds did not intend any offense by the painting: