{"id":63,"date":"2006-09-25T09:26:28","date_gmt":"2006-09-25T13:26:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/2006\/09\/25\/not-the-legendary-monster\/"},"modified":"2006-09-26T12:06:18","modified_gmt":"2006-09-26T16:06:18","slug":"not-the-legendary-monster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/2006\/09\/25\/not-the-legendary-monster\/","title":{"rendered":"Not the legendary monster"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This portrait of Dr. Johnson comes from a copy of A. Edward Newton&#8217;s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/lms01.harvard.edu\/F?func=find-c&amp;CCL_TERM=sys=09276759\">A Magnificent Farce<\/a><\/em> which belonged to the British artist and author Max Beerbohm. He has annotated it &#8220;Where <em>is<\/em> this portrait? Not in America, I do hope&#8211;for I&#8217;ve never seen it, and should like to, inasmuch as it&#8217;s far more convincing and <em>telling<\/em> than any of the others. This is the man that said those things. This is how he looked when he was saying them. This is intimately the dear man himself&#8211;not the legendary monster.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Beerbohm was certainly a man who knew about a telling portrait. He was celebrated for his incisive and witty caricatures of his contemporaries. Unfortunately for him, his worst fears were correct&#8211;the portrait was indeed in America, in Newton&#8217;s own Samuel Johnson collection, many items from which later ended up in the Hyde Collection. The portrait, however, Newton left to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.haverford.edu\">Haverford College in Pennsylvania<\/a>, where it currently resides. <a href=\"http:\/\/trilogy.brynmawr.edu\/mt\/hcspecial\/\">Diana Peterson<\/a> of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.haverford.edu\/library\/special\/#scwho\">Haverford College Libraries Quaker and Special Collections Department<\/a> informs me that a recent appraisal disproves the attribution of the portrait to Sir Joshua Reynolds, but it nonetheless remains a striking and very human image of Johnson.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"476\" height=\"774\" alt=\"Johnson portrait\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/files\/2006\/09\/Johnsonportrait.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This portrait of Dr. Johnson comes from a copy of A. Edward Newton&#8217;s A Magnificent Farce which belonged to the British artist and author Max Beerbohm. He has annotated it &#8220;Where is this portrait? Not in America, I do hope&#8211;for I&#8217;ve never seen it, and should like to, inasmuch as it&#8217;s far more convincing and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":245,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[769],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-overholt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/245"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}