AFTER JOHNSON'S death in 1784, the surviving members of his last club met to discuss what kind of monument to erect to him in St Paul's Cathedral. Some of Johnson's friends were apparently disturbed at the proposal to erect a full-length statue, ‘to transmit to posterity’, as Malone wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, ‘a true and perfect exhibition of the entire man’, because, in the fashion of the time, it was to show Johnson attired only in a Roman toga. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had disapproved of Pigalle's famous statue of Voltaire showing the philosopher ‘not only nude but with the withered shanks and scrawny torso of a septuagenarian’ was able to reassure them. ‘Johnson's limbs’, he declared, ‘so far from being unsightly’, were ‘uncommonly well-formed & in the most exact & true proportion’.

Seeing Johnson swim in the sea at Brighton in 1766 the ‘dipper’ (‘Dr Naked’, Johnson and Mr Thrale called him) declared, ‘Why, Sir, you must have been a stout hearted gentleman forty years ago.’ ‘His stature was remarkably high, and his limbs exceedingly large’, according to Mrs Thrale. When he was first introduced to his future wife, Elizabeth Porter, in 1734, at the age of twenty-five, he was then, according to her daughter, ‘lean and lank, so that his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye’, but in later years he got more to eat, put on weight and in 1773 Bos well described him as ‘large, robust, I may say approaching to the gigantick, and grown unweildy from corpulency’.