Lot 55: GARRICK, DAVID (1717-1779, actor and poet)

PORTRAIT TAKEN AFTER HIS DEATH MASK, WITH EYES ADDED, BY ROBERT EDGE PINE (1730-1788),
mezzotint, published 4 April 1779, on wove paper, mounted to view, some light foxing and spotting, slight rubbing apparent in a raking light, scratch lettering lower margin worn, restoration to other margins, 9¾ x 6¾ in (24.8 x 17.2 cm), sheet.

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 paucity 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 hommage 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.

Examples are to be found in the British Museum and the Harvard Theatre Collection and according to Christopher Lennox-Boyd it exists in multiple impressions in libraries and theatrical collections (Theatre: the Age of Garrick, 1994).

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 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.'