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| Thomas Murray Portrait of Sir Francis Leicester ca. 1700-1710 oil on canvas Tabley House, Cheshire |
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| Godfrey Kneller Portrait of Sir Christopher Wren 1711 oil on canvas National Portrait Gallery, London |
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| Nicolas de Largillière Portrait of Sir Robert Throckmorton 1729 oil on canvas National Trust, Coughton Court, Warwickshire |
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| Francis Hayman Portrait of John Conyers ca. 1725-50 oil on canvas Marble Hill House, London |
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| Joseph Highmore Portrait of a Gentleman before 1750 oil on canvas Chequers Court, Aylesbury |
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| Tilly Kettle Portrait of William Vyse 1762 oil on canvas Yale Center for British Art |
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| William Hoare Portrait of Charles Wyndham, 2nd Earl of Egremont 1763 oil on canvas National Trust, Petworth House, Sussex |
from Rasselas (chapter XXVII)
"I have been lately convinced that quiet is not the daughter of grandeur or of power: that her presence is not to be bought by wealth nor enforced by conquest. It is evident that as any man acts in a wider compass, he must be more exposed to opposition from enmity or miscarriage from chance; whoever has many to please or to govern must use the ministry of many agents, some of whom will be wicked and some ignorant; by some he will be misled and by others betrayed. If he gratifies one he will offend another; those that are not favored will think themselves injured; and, since favors can be conferred but upon few, the greater number will be always discontented. . . . None, however attentive, can always discover that merit which indigence or faction may happen to obscure; and none, however powerful, can always reward it. Yet he that sees inferior desert advanced above him will naturally impute that preference to partiality or caprice; and, indeed, it can scarcely be hoped that any man, however magnanimous by nature or exalted by condition, will be able to persist forever in fixed and inexorable justice of distribution: he will sometimes indulge his own affections, and sometimes those of his favorites; he will permit some to please him who can never serve him; he will discover in those whom he loves qualities which in reality they do not possess; and to those, from whom he receives pleasure, he will in his turn endeavor to give it. . . . He that has much to do will do something wrong, and of that wrong must suffer the consequences; and, if it were possible that he should always act rightly, yet when such numbers are to judge of his conduct, the bad will censure and obstruct him by malevolence, and the good sometimes by mistake. The highest stations cannot therefore hope to be the abodes of happiness, which I would willingly believe to have fled from thrones and palaces to seats of humble privacy and placid obscurity. For what can hinder the satisfaction, or intercept the expectations, of him whose abilities are adequate to his employments, who sees with his own eyes the whole circuit of his influence, who chooses by his own knowledge all whom he trusts, and whom none are tempted to deceive by hope or fear? Surely he has nothing to do but to love and to be loved, to be virtuous and to be happy."
– Samuel Johnson (1759)
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| Allan Ramsay Portrait of William Hunter ca. 1764-65 oil on canvas Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow |
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| George Romney Portrait of James Ainslie 1765 oil on canvas Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, Yorkshire |
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| attributed to Benjamin West Portrait of Francis Osborne, 5th Duke of Leeds ca. 1769 oil on canvas National Portrait Gallery, London |
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| Joseph Wright of Derby Portrait of Thomas Day 1770 oil on canvas Manchester Art Gallery |
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| Pompeo Batoni Portrait of John Smyth of Heath Hall, Yorkshire 1773 oil on canvas York City Art Gallery |
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| John Opie Self Portrait ca. 1785 oil on canvas National Trust, Hatchlands, Surrey |
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| Joshua Reynolds Portrait of Richard Brinsley Sheridan ca. 1785 oil on canvas Parliamentary Art Collection, London |
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| William Beechey The Prince of Wales ca. 1798 oil on canvas Royal Academy of Arts, London |