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Home , Johan Zoffany, William Hogarth

PROPERTY FROM A FAMILY COLLECTION (LOTS 49-55) 55 JOHANN ZOFFANY, R.A. ( 1733-1810 )

Garrick with Burton and Palmer in 'The Alchymist' oil on canvas 41√ x 40¿ in. (106.5 x 101.9 cm.) £1,000,000-1,500,000 US$1,500,000-2,100,000 €1,200,000-1,700,000

PROVENANCE: LITERATURE: Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A. (1723-1792), offered the artist 100 gns. for the J. Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, London, 1818, II, p.178. picture at the 1770 Royal Academy exhibition, but resigned his intended The Literary Gazette, 8th July 1826. purchase to the following, J.T. Smith, Nollekens and his Times, London, 1828, I, pp. 65-66. Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle (1748-1825), Castle Howard, and by C.R. Leslie and T. Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds, London, 1865, decsent to the following, I, p. 359. Major George Howard, Baron Howard of Henderskelfe (1920-1984), Castle Lady Victoria Manners and G.C. Williamson, John Zoffany, R.A., London, 1920, Howard, and by descent; Sotheby's, London, 29 November 2001, lot 11 pp. 26-27 and 186. (£861,500), when acquired. W.T. Whitley, Artists and their Friends in 1700-1799, London, 1928, I, pp. 262-263. EXHIBITED: G.C. Williamson, English Conversation Pieces of the 18th and Early 19th London, Royal Academy, 1770, no. 212. Centuries, London, 1931, p. 22, pl. LXIV. London, British Institution, 1814, no. 80. M. Webster, 'The Eighteenth Century', The Genius of British Painting, D. Piper, London, British Institution, 1840, no. 81. ed., London, 1975, p. 191, illustrated. London, New Gallery, Exhibition of the Royal House of Guelph, 1891, no. 316. N. Penny, ed., Reynolds, exhibition catalogue, London, 1986, p. 341. London, Grafton Gallery, Exhibition of dramatic and musical art, 1897, no. 97. M. Postle, ed., Johann Zoffany RA: Society Observed,exhibition catalogue, New London, Whitechapel Gallery, Shakespeare and Theatrical Memorial, 12 Haven and London, 2011, pp. 54-55, fig. 48. October-20 November 1910, no. 32. M. Webster, Johann Zoffany 1733-1810,New Haven and London, 2011, London, 45 Park Lane, English Conversation Pieces, March 1930, no. 1. pp. 206-210, figs. 169 and 170. Birmingham, Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery; and Port Sunlight, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Art and the Theatre, 2 July-4 September 1949, no. 200. ENGRAVED: London, Morley Gallery, Pictures from Castle Howard, 1970, no. 36. J. Dixon, 1771. London, National Portrait Gallery, 1733-1810, 14 January-27 March 1977, no. 59. York, York City Art Gallery, Masterpieces from Yorkshire Houses, 20 January-29 March 1994, no. 29.

206 In addition to the hammer price, a Buyer’s Premium (plus VAT) is payable. Other taxes and/or an Artist Resale Royalty fee are also payable if the lot has a tax or λ symbol. Check Section D of the Conditions of Sale at the back of this catalogue. Zoffany’s witty and engaging painting of in Ben Johnson’s an actor, Peter Thomson declared: ‘More than any other single actor, The Alchymist is widely regarded as one of his greatest theatre pictures, Garrick changed the acting style of the nation, above all because he a genre pioneered by in the 1740s and one that Zoffany engineered a shift in the expectations of audiences. In place of accuracy became the undisputed master of in the second half of the century. and control … Garrick gave them energy and engagement’ (P. Thomson, It immortalizes the most famous actor of the day in one of his most ‘David Garrick’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online). Garrick’s celebrated roles and showcases Zoffany’s extraordinary talent for celebrity status was a reflection of the central place held by the theatre capturing the personalities and expressions of the different characters in London society at this date: it was the most important shared cultural and their interaction on stage, as well as his supreme skill at rendering experience in the capital. Taking the season 1761-62, when Zoffany came costume and still life details. onto the scene, there were around 533 theatrical performances given in London, an average of more than 10 a week. Most of these were held at Born in Frankfurt, Zoffany spent time studying and working in before one of the two ‘patent theatres’, and Drury Lane, which travelling to England in 1760. He found employment initially painting enjoyed a monopoly imposed by the Licensing Act of 1737. The fact that clock-faces for the clockmaker Stephen Rimbault and then executing the government had moved to control the activity of theatres is itself drapery for the portrait painter Benjamin Wilson. He was saved from indicative of their power and influence. In addition, unlike most other this drudgery by David Garrick, who commissioned his first theatrical European courts (France in particular) the English royal family had no picture, David Garrick in ‘The Farmer’s Return’ (New Haven, Yale Center private theatre; King George III and Queen Charlotte, both keen on drama, for British Art), in 1762. This picture represented a new departure for the therefore had to attend the public theatres in the centre of London, which artist, who had specialised in mythological subjects before his arrival in lent the performances added glitz and glamour. There were also many London. Garrick’s discovery of Zoffany (possibly recommended to him by more newspapers and journals in Britain than in any other country, and Hogarth) transformed the artist’s fortunes and also supplied the actor with they were packed with critiques and gossip about the stage and its star the painter he had been looking for. As the most famous actor of the age, performers. Garrick was acutely aware of the ephemeral nature of his achievements and found in Zoffany an artist who could immortalise his triumphs on The Alchymist provided Garrick with one of his most enduring parts, stage with extraordinary vividness and precision. As an artist trained in that of Abel Drugger: he first played the role at Drury Lane in 1743 and , Zoffany was familiar with the rules of and the continued to play it on and off – in total eighty-five times - until 1776. maxim that any history painting should be based on a few words or lines The play recounts the cunning and deceitful antics of a servant named of text. In adapting himself to painting the London stage, Zoffany retained Face who has been left in charge of his master, Lovewell’s London house this crucial element of academic practice, as Hogarth had done before in Blackfriars. Face teams up with Subtle, a phony alchemist, and his him. As Robin Simon observed, in the exhibition catalogue to the 2011 mistress, Doll Common to deceive naive visitors with their spurious Zoffany exhibition at the Royal Academy: ‘Zoffany’s paintings borrow a alchemy. The callers include Sir Epicure Mammon, two Puritans from kind of respectability from their reflection of this central tenet of academic Amsterdam called Tribulation and Ananias, and the tobacconist Abel practice, but at the same time they follow Hogarth’s very British precedent Drugger. The original play was written by Ben Jonson in 1610 as a on of focusing on the particular likeness of the actors portrayed. They are greed and its immense popularity at the time was credited with helping to history pictures of a kind, but they are also portraits’ (R. Simon, ‘Strong rid London of alchemists. When Pepys saw it in 1661, he described it as ‘a impressions of their art: Zoffany & the Theatre’, in M. Postle, ed., op, cit., most incomparable play’, and Coleridge later described it as having one of 2011, p. 52). the three most perfect plots in all literature. Garrick reduced the original three thousand words by a third, omitting some of the more obscure David Garrick was not only an actor, but also a playwright, theatre references to alchemy. His immense success in the role was due to his manager and producer, who influenced nearly every aspect of theatrical masterly underplaying. His friend and biographer Thomas Davies wrote practice in eighteenth-century Britain. When considering his legacy as

208 209 that: ‘the moment he came upon the stage, he discovered such awkward simplicity, and his looks so happily bespoke the ignorant, selfish and absurd tobacco-merchant, that it was a contest not easily to be decided, whether the host of laughter or applause were loudest. Through the whole part he strictly preserved the modesty of nature’ (cited in Webster, op. cit., p. 209).

The episode in the play that Zoffany has depicted here is from Act II, Scene 6, when Abel Drugger has requested a device for his shop sign and Subtle has proposed a bell, for Abel, and beside it a figure of Dr Dee, the astrologer, in a rug gown, making up Drug, and next to this a dog snarling ‘Er’, to make up Drugger. The German scientist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who saw Garrick perform the role in September 1775, described the effect Garrick added to this moment in the play: ‘When the astrologer spells out from the stars the name of Abel Drugger, henceforth to be great, the poor gullible creature says with heart felt delight: ‘That is my name’. Garrick makes him keep his joy to himself, for to blurt it out before everyone would be lacking in decency. So Garrick turns aside, hugging his delight to himself for a few moments, so that he actually gets those red rings round his eyes which often accompany great joy, at least, when violently suppressed, and says to himself: That is my name. The effect of this judicious restraint is indescribably, for one did Fig. 1 Johann Zoffany, R.A.,Studies of Garrick as Abel Drugger in ‘The Alchymist’, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford not see him as a simpleton being gulled, but as a much more ridiculous creature, with an air of secret triumph, thinking himself the slyest of rogues’ (ibid.).

Zoffany captured this subtlety brilliantly in this picture. Garrick is not placed centre-stage, but stands facing the wings, looking round towards the two central characters of Subtle on the left (played by Edmund Burton) Zoffany has delighted in rendering the multitude of curious and wonderful : ‘and Zoffany superior to everybody, in a portrait of Garrick in the in the black robes of a learned doctor and Face in the centre (played by objects that make up the carefully staged cabinet of curiosities on the character of Abel Drugger, with two other characters, Subtle and Face … ) in the flamboyant red uniform of a captain. Attention is draped table and ledge to the left – incorporating an armillary sphere, a Sir Joshua agreed to give an hundred guineas for the picture; Lord Carlisle drawn to Garrick as the principal subject of the painting by the broad shaft dried fish surmounted by a large bat, jars containing a foetus and a lizard, half an hour after offered Reynolds twenty to part with it, which the Knight of light from the window on the left. All three actors are linked by their a human skull, an hour glass and a flying fish – all designed to assure and generously refused, resigned his intended purchase to the Lord, and the poses, gestures and expressions: Drugger smiles in self-congratulation impress prospective customers of Subtle’s credentials as an alchemist. emolument to his brother artist’ (ibid., p. 210). A writer in the London believing himself to have the upper hand, while Face and Subtle smirk Chronicle reported the same story, adding: ‘This picture is so much with enjoyment having successfully deceived another customer. All Zoffany may already have begun this painting in December 1769, eager esteemed that we hear Lord Ossory would have given fifty guineas more three actors are dressed in period costume, as became the custom from to produce an exceptional picture for the Royal Academy’s next annual for it’. The Alchymist has remined among the most admired of Zoffany’s the mid-eighteenth century when acting in Jacobean plays: Drugger in exhibition, now that he had been retrospectively elected a founding theatrical pictures. Jacobean breeches and the dark stockings of a humble tradesman; Face member of the Academy by King George III. When it was included in in a white ruff, red doublet and breeches, and a red hat with black feather, the Academy’s second exhibition, in 1770, it was greeted with universal Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle was an important patron and with a sword at his waist; and Subtle in a black academic hat and black acclaim. Walpole wrote in his copy of the catalogue: ‘This most excellent collector, whose collecting began when as a young man he visited Italy fur-trimmed gown over a black slashed doublet, with his spectacles, picture of Burton, J. Palmer and Garrick, as Abel Drugger, is one of the on the Grand Tour. He owned important works by Gainsborough and moneybag and a key hanging from a girdle at this waist. Two oil studies best pictures ever done by this Genius’. Garrick’s friend Joseph Cradock Reynolds, and became a director of the British Institution. In May 1796, he in the Ashmolean (fig. 1) show that Zoffany experimented with the considered it one of the best likenesses of the actor. Mary Webster bought two further theatrical pictures by Zoffany from the dealer Michael positioning of Drugger: in one he has taken off his hat and is bending his describes its subsequent sale at the exhibition as: ‘one of the most Bryan –Mr Foote in the character of Major Sturgeon, in ‘The Mayor of knees in humble greeting to Subtle; in the other he digs in his pockets for celebrated incidents in Zoffany’s life’ ibid.( ). The incident was relayed by Garratt’ and Mr Foote and Mr Weston in the characters of the President and the piece of gold to offer to Subtle. , a fellow Academician, in a letter to Fuseli, who was then in Dr Last in ‘The Devil Upon Two Sticks’.

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