Page 26 - Francis Cotes - A winning end-game

Fig 9. WILLIAM HOGARTH, Mr and Mrs Garrick, Royal
Collection.
artists produced paintings that showed a different
view of marriage, as a partnership, a place of fun, but Garrick was also a promoter of a more
teasing, joint achievement.
One of the earliest and most charming, often
mentioned in this context, was William
Hogarth’s portrait of David Garrick and his
actress wife Eva Maria, painted in 1757, (Fig.
9. Royal Collection) showing Garrick, at work
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on the prologue to Samuel Foote’s play Taste,
while she tiptoes up behind him to steal his pen,
a loving interruption. The great actor was a close
friend of Hogarth, and one senses their affection,
natural style of acting. In this domestic portrait
Hogarth – who had painted him on stage in
the striking pose of Richard III seeing the
ghost before the Battle of Bosworth - provided
his own visual version of ‘naturalism’. It is an
affectionate, personal portrait but also, as so often
with Hogarth’s work, a manifesto of ‘taste’, the
subject of Foote’s play lying on the table.4
In subsequent decades the ideal of the
companionate marriage, indeed the notion that
a husband could be emotionally educated, and
refined, by the tender insights of his wife, was
fuelled by the cult of sentiment, or sensibility.
Couples now strolled out together, or shared an
interest in books, and art –there are innumerable
paintings of the husband gesturing towards some
book, or sculpture, while his wife bends her
head in interested approval. Cotes had already
painted one successful double portrait of a
married couple, the more mature and solid-
looking M r. and Mrs. Thomas Crathorne,
1767 (Fig. 10. Huntington Library and Art
Gallery), showing Thomas, in van Dyke dress,
4. Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World (1997), pp. 588-90