Genius Fan

Sketching faces to illustrate Genius Fan stories is a core part of the fun in this project for me. It can take a long time to get a likeness, and sometimes I have to go ahead and publish when I know the sketch isn’t quite right and could be improved. I decide on the story I’m going to tell, then work out the illustration to accompany it and at the same time search out a suitable portrait on the internet. Sometimes the image I’ve got is an Eighteenth century painting, other times it’s a poor reproduction of a black and white photo from a newspaper accessed through the internet, like it was with the Yale University librarian Herman Liebert. I got a New York Times pic from 1951 featuring him and others, but I couldn’t get a distinguishable representation, so dropped that sketch. I’m unsatisfied with the Spence and Warburton watercolour sketches. To me, the portraits give them a long, blank, undetailed expression. And when I try to copy that, my paintings look naive.

I thought it would be interesting to drop these portraits onto the same illustration, all together. Kind of to see how far my skill has progressed. I notice some faces from the blog aren’t in the image on this post. No matter. You get the gist. If you want to judge how close I got to the original image I’ve numbered each face in the image and listed them below. I’ve also linked each name to the story that person features in.

1. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
2. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
3. Henry Raeburn (1756-1823)
4. Paul Sandby (1731-1809)
5. Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788)
6. Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792)
7. Topham Beauclerk (1739-1780)
8. Dr William Warburton (1698-1779)
9. Rev Joseph Spence (1699-1768)
10. Claude Colleer Abbott (1889-1971)
11. Robert William Chapman (1881-1960)
12. Frederick A Pottle (1897-1987)
13. Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)
14. Donald Greene 1914-1997)
15. James Boswell (1740-1795)
16. James Boswell (1740-1795)
17. Hesketh Pearson (1887-1964)
18. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
19. Samuel Pepys (1633-1703)
20. Fanny Burney (1752-1840)
21. Colwyn Edward Vulliamy (1886-1971)
22. Mortimer Adler (1902-2001)
23. Arthur Herman (1956- )
24. Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774)
25. Robert Burns (1759-1796)
26. Flora Macdonald (1722-1790)
27. Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
28. Roy Porter (1946-2002)
29. James Boswell (1740-1795)
30. James Beattie (1735-1803)
31. Richard Steele (1672-1729)
32. Philip Roth (1933-2018)
33. Dr William Smellie (1697-1763)