Attributed to Joseph Wright of Derby, Ara, 1734-1797 Portrait of Samuel Foote 1720-1777 with David Garrick 1717-1779 & His Wife Eva Maria Veigel 1724–1822

Attributed to Joseph Wright of Derby, ARA, 1734-1797

Thought to be a Portrait of Samuel Foote 1720-1777 with David Garrick 1717-1779 & his wife Eva Maria Veigel 1724–1822

oil on canvas

32.1/4 x 43.1/2in. (82 x 110cm.)

Provenance

The Marquess of Linlithgow, Bryngwyn Hall

Notes

The sitters in this portrait were leading lights of theatre and entertainment in the 18th century, they collaborated both on and off stage and appeared in other portraits.

David Garrick, (1717–1779), actor and playwright, was born on 19 February 1717 at The Angel inn in Hereford, the third of the seven children of Peter Garrick (1685–1737), an army officer, and his wife, Arabella (d. 1740), the daughter of Anthony Clough, a vicar-choral of Lichfield Cathedral. His paternal grandfather, David de la Garrique, was among the many Huguenots to leave France after the revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685. There was a distinct community of émigré Huguenots in London at the end of the seventeenth century, and the sparse journal kept by David de la Garrique (rewritten initially as Garric, and then as Garrick) from 1685 to 1701 bears witness to his devoutness. Imprecisely described as a merchant, he seems to have been prosperous enough to have purchased for his son Peter a commission in a regiment of foot in April 1706. It was his army service that took Peter Garrick to the garrison at Lichfield, Staffordshire, where the growing family lived close to the cathedral, in Bird (later Beacon) Street.

Lieutenant Peter Garrick was on a recruiting mission in Hereford when the future actor was born, but it was in Lichfield that the boy spent his formative years. The family was not, by contemporary standards, poor, but it was a struggle for Peter Garrick to maintain his wife and children, particularly after, as a career officer during a period of peace, he was reduced to half pay. The habitual prudence in financial matters that would earn for David Garrick a reputation for meanness owed something to family circumstance during his boyhood. There was, however, no social deprivation. As an officer in a garrison town Peter Garrick had easy access to the cream of Lichfield society, and the young David's close interest in many of the most prominent citizens is evident in his earliest surviving letters. The first of these, written when he was not quite sixteen, dates from the mid-point of Peter Garrick's prolonged absence in Gibraltar. Now with the rank of captain, and presumably under financial pressure, Peter had, in 1729, entered active service under Major-General Percy Kirke, with the Queen's Own 2nd regiment of foot. With his elder brother, also called Peter, serving as an ensign in the navy, and his mother and elder sister, Magdalen, in consistently poor health, David was, precociously, the virtual head of the household until his father's return in May 1736. To judge from the tone of his letters to his father, it was a job he generally relished, although his enjoyment of it was delayed by a curious episode. It was not only David's father who left home in 1729. At some time during that year he himself was sent to Lisbon to learn the wine trade from his uncle and namesake, who prospered as a vintner in that city. The decision to interrupt young David's schooling must have been taken for financial reasons, and it may have been his son's unhappiness in Portugal that persuaded Captain Garrick to volunteer for the Gibraltar posting. Within a year David was back at Lichfield grammar school.

There is presumptive evidence, despite the Portuguese venture, that Garrick's parents hoped to see their sons well educated. The regimen at the grammar school, under its headmaster Dr John Hunter, was a stern one, and it was probably outside school hours that the twelve-year-old Garrick first involved himself in theatrical activity. He was the prime mover in a