Next to the Stratford bust, the sculptured portrait of Shakspere most familiar to the world is that which stands in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. The artist went to some strange source for the likeness, and although it was for gentle Shakspere cut, by no means does it outdo the life. “I saw old Samuel Johnson,” said Cumberland, describing Garrick’s funeral—“I saw old Samuel Johnson standing at the foot of Shakspere’s monument, and bathed in tears.” Burke on that occasion remarked that the statue of Shakspere looked towards Garrick’s grave; and on this stray hint, as Mr. Brander Matthews believes, Sheridan hung his famous couplet in the Monody:
“While Shakspere’s image, from its hallowed base,
Served to prescribe the grave and point the place.”
Garrick’s face, it is said, was wonderfully under control, and his features had a marvellous flexibility, which rendered variety and rapid change of expression an easy matter. The story of his having frightened Hogarth by standing before him as the ghost of Fielding, assuming the appearance of the dead novelist in all the fixedness and rigidity of death, has often been told. There are many original portraits of Garrick in existence. The Garrick Club in London possesses at least a dozen, while The Players in New York own two by Zoffany, and one by Reynolds.
A not uncommon print, entitled “The Mask of Garrick taken from the Face after Death,” is in the Shaksperian Library at Stratford-upon-Avon, and it is to be found in Evans’s “Catalogue of Engraved Portraits.” It does not seem, however, to be the portrait of a dead man, being full of living expression, and it is, perhaps, an enlarged reproduction of the face in the miniature by Pine of Bath, now in the Garrick Club, the eyes having the same dilatation of pupil which was characteristic of the great actor.
The mask here shown was purchased in 1876 from the late Mr. Marshall, the antiquarian dealer in Stratford, who possessed what he believed to be its pedigree written in pencil on the back of the plaster, and now unfortunately defaced. He asserted that it was taken from life, and that it had come by direct descent from the sculptor’s hands into his. There is a replica of it in the Shakspere Museum at Stratford, but no history is attached to it, and the trustees know nothing about it, except that it was “the gift of the late Miss Wheeler.” It resembles very strongly the familiar portrait of Garrick by Hogarth, the original of which hangs in one of the bedrooms of Windsor Castle.
DAVID GARRICK