Gerard Van Swieten and his Time

cold and earache at the Vatican. If his ears had discharged at the Vatican or afterwards at least one of his biographers, or Reynolds himself in his diary, where he carefully recorded his eye symptoms, would have made some mention of it. Hilles quotes many of Reynolds' letters, in some of which he refers to his poor sight, but never to his poor hearing. Thus it would seem that Sir Joshua Reynolds' deafness was the sequelae of an episode of middle-ear disease, and on the available evidence of the non-suppurative type.