The Garrick was originally started at 35 King Street, Covent Garden, in 1831, “for the purpose of bringing together the ‘patrons’ of the drama and its professors, and also for offering literary men a rendezvous.”
The club-house had been a family hotel. It was comfortable enough when it was first transformed into the home of the Garrick Club, but in course of time the building was found insufficient for the increased number of members, and in 1864 the club removed to a new house built for them a little farther west than the old one, in the then newly-made Garrick Street—a classic region associated with the old club-house.
The new Garrick was built by Mr. Marrable, who cleverly surmounted certain difficulties connected with the back of the building.
The bulk of the Garrick Club collection consists of the gallery formed by the elder Mathews, who had a passion for collecting theatrical portraits, and who purchased most of the pictures owned by Mr. Harris, the old lessee of Covent Garden.
Mrs. Mathews, the actor’s wife and biographer, describes how the pictures were saved from the swindling tenant who robbed them of their rent in the King’s Road cottage. Mathews’s “giant hobby,” as she calls it, was then (1814) in its infancy; but the Mr. Tonson who succeeded them in the cottage begged to be allowed to retain the pictures, which were at that time hanging in one small room. Mathews, who would as soon have left behind him an eye or a limb as these his treasures, managed to retain them. Later on he built at his house at Hampstead a special gallery for his pictures, which had then considerably increased in number. Many writers came there to see them, all of whom were not equally appreciative. When, however, Mathews found a real judge of art, he called it “receiving a dividend,” and would launch out into all sorts of disquisitions as to his treasures, enlivened by anecdotes and imitations of the persons portrayed. Inquisitive people, who came to see the actor as a celebrity rather than to inspect his pictures, irritated and exasperated him by their behaviour and their mistakes, which were often absurd. Harlowe’s fine picture of Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth was taken for a portrait of Mrs. Mathews; Dewilde’s exquisite portrait of Miss De Camp—Mrs. Charles Kemble—in male attire, in “The Gentle Shepherd,” was praised as being Master Betty. One individual, who had evidently never entered a London theatre, asked why there was no portrait of Milton. Eventually all the pictures were exhibited in Oxford Street, and there still exists a catalogue of this exhibition, to which a characteristic article of Charles Lamb’s, which appeared in the London Magazine, is prefixed.
During Mathews’s lifetime the collection was removed to the Garrick Club. It then practically passed into the possession of a member, Mr. John Durrant, who eventually gave the pictures to the club.
There are many good portraits of Mathews at the Garrick, of which the most remarkable is, perhaps, the one by Harlowe, who depicted him in four perfectly different and distinct characters—a tribute to the actor’s versatility. The four characters are those of Fond Barneyl, the idiot newsvendor of York; another weak-minded simpleton catching a fly; Mr. Wiggins, an extraordinarily stout man, in a farce called “Mrs. Wiggins”; and Mathews himself in ordinary day dress. Another good portrait, by Clint, A.R.A., shows Liston and Mathews in “The Village Lawyer,” the former as Sheepface, the latter as Scout. Liston impressed people on casual acquaintance with an idea of inveterate gravity; as Sheepface he fairly amazed Mathews, and in this part made him laugh so much that he was hardly able to go on.
Two of the finest pictures in the Garrick are those representing Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard in “Macbeth,” and Garrick and Mrs. Cibber in “Venice Preserved.” Zoffany, who excelled in theatrical portraiture, painted both of these. Another portrait by him shows the great actor as Lord Chalkstone.
The fine picture of Macbeth is highly interesting on account of Garrick’s costume. Though a stage reformer, he did not dare to discard old traditions of dress, and played the Highland thane in a long-skirted blue coat with crimson cuffs, and a full-bottomed wig of the Georgian period. Occasionally he acted Macbeth in the costume of a fashionable gentleman of the day—a suit of black silk, with silk stockings, and shoes, buckles at the knees and feet, a full-bottomed wig, and sword.
Benjamin West once asked Garrick why he adhered to this ridiculous usage, to which he replied that he was afraid of his audience, who would have thrown bottles at him if he had dared to change. John Philip Kemble, when stage-manager at Drury Lane, finally corrected the absurdities of stage costume, although Henderson appears to have preceded him in this respect. In Romney’s picture of Henderson as Macbeth, which is in the club, the chieftain appears as a medieval warrior wearing body armour, with arms and legs bare. In 1772 Macklin played Macbeth at Covent Garden in the dress of a Highlander, but, being a clumsy old man, he is said to have looked more like a Scotch piper than a warrior. Kemble, oddly enough, first played Othello in the full uniform of a British General—as Macbeth he wore a hearse-like plume in his bonnet; whilst Mrs. Crough, the singer, who played the First Witch, wore powdered hair and the fashionable costume of her day.