“He said I might make a good picture of him – but none as good as the picture he had seen at a recent dinner party where he glimpsed, over the shoulder of his hostess, a perfect portrait of himself: “Cruel, you understand, a diabolical caricature, but absolutely true.” He pushed by the lady, approached the living image, and found he was looking into a mirror! The old man peered at me quizzically to see if I appreciated his little joke. It was then that I caught him in my portrait.”
Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist George Bernard Shaw was born on this day, July 27, in 1856 (d. 1950).