‘Happiness,’ said the most controversial and certainly the most impish of modern philosophers, ‘comes from pandering to one’s self-esteem.’ I judged from the gleam of mischief in Lord Russell’s eye that this was likely to prove a controversial sitting. I was wrong. My subject delights to tilt with intellectual giants, he expresses a profound and almost terrifying pessimism, but is quite amenable before the camera. He distracted me with his dark thoughts when my mind should have been on my work.

Bertrand Russell was born today, May 18, in 1872 (d. 1970). Russell was a philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, the year after this portrait was made.