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David Garrick was the most famous actor in England when Gainsborough painted him in 1770, the manager and star of the Drury Lane theatre in London. Just the year before, Garrick had staged a huge festival at Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate Shakespeare, doing as much as anyone to turn the playwright into a national hero. Gainsborough painted him at Bath, the fashionable spa town, and liked the result so much that he kept it in his studio for two years to make a copy for his own parlour, so he could look, he said, at a great man who had thought him worth some notice. Horace Walpole, who knew Garrick well, judged the likeness very like.