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Description: | Displayed throughout the Club is its remarkable collection of art works representing the history of the British theatre. There are over 1000 paintings, drawings and sculptures, a fascinating selection of theatrical memorabilia, and thousands of prints and photographs.
The Collection has been brought together mainly by gift or bequest, with the first presentation made as early as November 1831 by Henry Broadwood; appropriately enough it was a small copy of the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare.
By far the largest portion of the collection (349 paintings and drawings) originated with the actor Charles Mathews, one of the original members of the Club who had a passion for collecting theatrical portraits; they were once displayed by him in a gallery at his home, Ivy Cottage, in Highgate, North London. Mathews managed to secure a large number of pictures from the collection of Thomas Harris, who had been manager of Theatre Royal Covent Garden, and which included paintings by the likes of Johan Zoffany, Francis Hayman and Gainsborough Dupont.
He also actively commissioned artists such as Samuel De Wilde to paint all the popular stars of the stage at that time (there are 196 works by De Wilde in the collection). Mathews had hoped to sell the collection to the Club and it appears that lengthy negotiations were entered into without any result. It was eventually purchased by a wealthy stock-broker and donated to the Club, having already hung on its walls for many years.
Members and friends have continued leaving pictures, with many coming from artist members, such as Clarkson Stanfield and David Roberts, who with fellow scene painter Louis Haghe painted a series of large canvasses especially for the Smoking Room at the old Clubhouse. RobertsÂ's Temple at Baalbec remains today one of the most important paintings by that artist. Sir John Everett Millais is represented by one of his most important portraits, that of Henry Irving which he painted and presented to the Club in 1884.
The picture collection has continued to expand throughout the twentieth century with artists such as Edward Seago and Feliks Topolski both represented. In the year 2000 the Club inaugurated the Garrick/Milne painting prize for works depicting performance, although more recently this has been replaced with an ongoing programme of commissions. Considered to be more than a museum, the ClubÂ's collection continues to live and breathe, and dominates all available wall space including the bedrooms, offices and even the lavatories!
In addition to the pictures there are also nearly 100 sculptures in the collection, depicting actors from Garrick through to Gielgud. There is also a small collection of death-masks, the finest perhaps being those of Edmund Kean and Henry Irving. However by far the most important sculpture in the Club is Louis François RoubiliacÂ's bust of Shakespeare, the so-called Â-Davenant Bust”, re-discovered during the demolition of the old LincolnÂ's Inn Theatre by the Royal College of Surgeons in the nineteenth century, before being presented to the Club by the Duke of Devonshire in 1855.
There is also a collection of theatrical memorabilia, which includes jewellery, snuff boxes, swords, walking-sticks, tickets and shoe-buckles. There is David Garrick's chair from Drury Lane Theatre, his powder puff and his fly-fishing rod; the ring worn by Henry Irving as Charles I; a Lalique lotus flower worn by Sara Bernhardt as Ixeil; the dog collar worn by Charles Kean's Saint Bernard and Noël Coward's perfume ioniser.
In 1997 the actor Richard Bebb presented a large collection primarily of porcelain figurines, to which was added a bequest in 2006 from Henry Mcgee, making the ClubÂ's collection in this area very substantial.
The print collection (which runs into the thousands) provides a complete history of the iconography of British theatre, from small-scale frontispieces for published plays, to grand mezzotints, and from popular penny-plains/tuppence coloureds to romantic lithographs. There is a major collection of 79 tinsel prints, the majority of which form the Beatrice Maria Loveland Collection presented in 1951. The Club also holds David GarrickÂ's own collection of 106 Hogarth Engravings, complete with a bill of sale.
Published Catalogues of the primary collections are available, the most recent being Pictures in the Garrick Club by Geoffrey Ashton (edited by Kalman A Burnim & Andrew Wilton) 1997, The Richard Bebb Collection in the Garrick Club by Kalman A Burnim & Andrew Wilton 2001, and Brief Lives: Sitters and Artists in the Garrick Club Collection by Kalman A Burnim & John Baskett 2003. Since 2001 there has been an ongoing programme to catalogue the collections not previously covered by these publications; for example more than 1300 prints and engravings have already been catalogued. Since 2005 the contents of all the above publications have been updated and are now freely available in an online catalogue via the ClubÂ's web-site www.garrickclub.co.uk.; The Garrick Club | Subjects: | Dance Librettists Amateur theatre Poets Playwrights Performance history Theatre producers Open air theatre Actors Painters Theatre directors Variety Cinema Music Social history Biographers Music hall Dancers Films Scriptwriters Circuses Musicians Pantomime Operetta Vaudeville Sculptors Opera Comedians Theatre management Novelists Songwriters Popular theatre Contemporary theatre Conductors (music) Cartoonists National theatre Theatre and society TV/Radio artists Repertory theatre Singers Travelling theatre Art collections | Source: | Cornucopia - Discovering UK Collections | Identifier: | oai:www.cornucopia.org.uk:8856 | Go to resource |
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Club
Marked E339 'FIJI' CULT unknown…
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