Tag: Joshua Reynolds
-
Portraits of William Hunter by Reynolds, Chamberlin, and Ramsay
Stephen MartinThailand The Hunterian in Glasgow University and The Royal Academy, London, have three portraits of the anatomist Dr William Hunter.1,2 They make a particularly interesting group with personalized, cryptic symbols and plain emblems of anatomy and the Enlightenment. Despite some discussion,3 their specific icons have never been analyzed. Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds Reynolds…
-
The Turk’s Head Literary Club
Elizabeth SteinhartJMS PearceHull, England We share a fascination for the varied activities, relics, and quirky names of eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries’ gentlemen’s clubs and societies. One of us (ES) recently found the blue plaque of the Turk’s Head Literary Club above a Chinese supermarket in London’s Soho. Distinguished literati, physicians, and scientists were members of such…
-
Samuel Johnson: “The great convulsionary”
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom This paper reproduces in an abridged form an earlier article by its author1 appraising the evidence that Samuel Johnson suffered from Tourette’s syndrome. Several authors have commented on the many eccentricities of Dr. Samuel Johnson (Fig 1).2 Thomas Tyers, for example, has written as follows: His gestures, which were a…
-
Portraits of vision: Sir Joshua Reynolds
Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, United States The subject of this portrait wears wiry, diminutive round spectacles, lending a distinctly pedantic flair. Yet gazing out is none other than Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), one of the greatest English painters in history (fig. 1). Sir Joshua headed the Royal Academy of Painters for twenty-four years, and wielded enormous…