Edward Gibbon’s Baby Cheeks

Portrait (oil on canvas) by Sir Joshua Reynolds of English historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

“The picture of him painted by Sir J. Reynolds, and the prints made from it, are as like the original as it is possible to be. When he was introduced to a blind French lady, the servant happening to stretch out her mistress’s hand to lay hold of the historian’s cheek, she thought, upon feeling its rounded contour, that some trick was being played upon her with the sitting part of a child, and exclaimed, ‘Fi donc!’ [‘Fie for shame!’]”

—James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone, 1860; “Maloniana”