David Garrick Between Tragedy and Comedy

David Garrick was the most famous actor in 18th-century Britain, and around 1761 Joshua Reynolds painted him as a man caught between two women. On one side the muse of Tragedy, severe and pale, tries to pull him toward her. On the other the muse of Comedy, softer and laughing, tugs the other way, and Garrick, grinning at us, is clearly leaning toward the fun. Reynolds built the joke on an old moral picture, the Choice of Hercules, in which the hero must decide between hard virtue and easy pleasure. Here nobody is choosing anything so lofty. It was one of Reynolds's first real attempts at grand figure painting, and it hangs today at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire.