This week’s choice of picture was inspired by the fascinating exhibition currently at the Holburne Museum in Bath, “Every Look Speaks: Portraits of David Garrick”. It was painted by the talented German emigre Johann Zoffany and shows eighteenth-century England’s most celebrated actor playing the part of the aptly named Sir John Brute in Vanbrugh’s popular Restoration comedy The Provok’d Wife.


The painting commemorates a performance that took place on the evening of 18 April 1763 and besides the spotlit Garrick, shown resplendent in drag, it furnishes a rare glimpse of some of the lesser lights in his troupe. Their function in the painting, as it was also, no doubt, in the performance of the play itself, is to act as foils to his glorious comic genius. For all the self-evident absurdity of his role, he is plainly the master of his own artificial world. Zoffany indicates his stage presence not just through the composition and lighting of his picture, but also in the contrast drawn between Garrick’s compact, almost incongruously graceful histrionics and the caricatured buffonery of his scattered foes. The effect is strikingly similar to that described by a young German visitor to London, George Christian Lichtenberg, who saw Garrick in action: “When he steps on to the boards, even when not expressing fear, hope, suspicion, or any other passion, the eyes of all are drawn immediately to him alone; he moves to and fro among the players like a man among marionettes … where other players in the movements of their arms and legs allow themselves six inches or more scope in every direction farther than the canons of beauty would permit, he hits the mark with admirable certainty and firmness.”



Garrick is widely credited with having brought about the so-called “Natural Revolution” in English eighteenth-century theatre....

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