Man of many guises

David Garrick (1717–79) was widely acknowledged to be the greatest actor of his age, and he was also a successful businessman, managing the Drury Lane Theatre for nearly 30 years. He was broadly interested in the arts, wrote his own plays, and had many friends, among whom were some of the finest painters of the day. The exhibition Every Look Speaks: Portraits of David Garrick, mounted with much brio by the excellent Holburne Museum in Bath, and guest-curated by Desmond Shawe-Taylor, the director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, seeks to present Garrick in many guises and to suggest that in at least several cases the portraits of him were collaborations between artist and sitter. In other words, that Garrick had the sort of influence over established artists that even the most nervous and inexperienced ‘face-painter’ would heartily resent, let alone the masters of the moment. Artists do not like being told what to do. But then Garrick was by all accounts a remarkable man. The collision of wills could have turned into collusion, but I remain sceptical.

That is not to detract one iota from what is a fascinating and very enjoyable exhibition, containing many beautiful paintings. The exhibition is divided between two spaces: a room on the ground floor, given over mostly to prints and artefacts, and the spacious top-floor gallery where the majority of the portraits are hung. In the downstairs room is Garrick’s pinewood dressing-table from Drury Lane (borrowed from the Museum of London), and a rather amusing drawing by Hogarth demonstrating that although Garrick was actually much smaller than his greatest rival, the actor James Quin, he was of a ‘taller proportion’ than the larger man. In a nearby cabinet, as if to rebuff this theory, there’s a Derby porcelain figure of the substantial Quin playing the favourite role of Falstaff.