GARRICK 'ALIVE' AFTER DEATH

GARRICK (DAVID, 1717-1779, actor) IMPORTANT RARE MEZZOTINT PORTRAIT OF DAVID GARRICK TAKEN AFTER HIS DEATH MASK, WITH EYES ADDED, BY ROBERT EDGE PINE (1730-1788), full-face, on wove paper, mounted to view, size of image with margins c. 9¼ x 6¼ (235 mm x 161 mm), overall size of mount c. 19¾ x 14 inches, some light foxing and spotting, slight rubbing apparent in a raking light, scratch lettering and lower margin worn, restoration to other margins, 4 April 1779

This haunting image has the dual distinction of being the only known mezzotint portrait using a death mask as its source and the only known mezzotint by Robert Edge Pine. G.W. Stone and G.M. Kahrl, in their monumental biography of Garrick, 1979, regret the lack of information that has survived about the connection and friendship of Pine and Garrick. The present portrait was doubtless done by Pine as a special homage to his friend, very shortly after the actor's death (20 January 1779). By inserting eyes in an image derived from a death mask Pine sought to restore life to the face of one of the greatest English actors.

Pine is known to have painted numerous portraits of Garrick in oils and a large allegorical composition 'Garrick reciting an Ode to Shakespeare'. The frequency with which he painted the actor 'suggests a fascination that went beyond pure economics.' (William Pressly, A Catalogue of Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1993). They shared a passion for Shakespeare: in 1782 in London and in 1784 in Philadelphia Pine exhibited numerous paintings illustrating the bard's plays. In 1783 Pine left England for America where Washington, Robert Morris, George Read and Thomas Stone were among his sitters. He took to America a plaster cast of the Venus de' Medici, which he was obliged to keep in a box, because it was the first specimen of a nude statue in America.

No example of the present portrait is recorded in the National Portrait Gallery, the Folger Shakespeare Library or Garrick Club, although the image is referred to in the catalogues of both of the last two collections. Examples are to be found in the British Museum and the Harvard Theatre Collection. Because of its rarity, the condition of this mezzotint will be acceptable except to the most uncompromising purist. The restoration work has been limited to making good paper losses in the margins.

It would appear that Pine was on the cutting edge of technology in terms of the paper employed for this mezzotint. While wove paper is not common before the nineteenth century, James Whatman first supplied it for John Baskerville's Virgil, published in 1757. Whatman himself told Joshua Gilpin, the American papermaker, in 1796, that wove paper was little used before 1778, one year before Pine's portrait (John Krill, English Artists Paper, 1987, p. 66). Also see the review article of John Balston's, The Whatmans and Wove Paper, 1998, in The Book Collector (Summer 1999), on the use of wove paper in the eighteenth century, particularly the timely aperçu that 'Prints, if not printed books, remain a possible and usually dated source, as yet unexplored'. Wove paper has qualities that are especially desirable to the mezzotinter.

When Garrick died Johnson wrote: 'I am disappointed by that stroke of death which has eclipsed the gaiety of nations and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.'

Sheridan, the chief mourner, contrived and supervised the funeral. 'The body was most magnificently interred in Westminster Abbey under the monument of his beloved Shakespeare. He was attended to the grave by persons of the first rank; by men of illustrious genius, and the famous for science; by those who loved him living, and lamented his death. Twenty-four of the principal actors of both theatres were also attendants at the funeral; and with unfeigned sorrow regretted the loss of so great an ornament to their profession, and so manifest a benefactor to their charitable institution.'

£2,500