Thanks to an excellent new project at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, they are making more of their articles available through a monthly online magazine. This month the focus is on Hogarth and his sitters and circle (linking with the just-opening Tate exhibition that I hope to get to see soonish).
Somehow you don’t think of Hogarth as a painter of women – big bluff men who’ve imbibed just a little too much Madeira seem to fit more, but there are a couple of women featured, one of them being Eva Maria Garrick, who was, it seems, another of those power behind the throne women, after having a successful independent career of her own as a dancer.
The marriage settlement, when it was reached, was a virtual guarantee of prosperity … Not only did she receive £10,000 from Garrick, together with £70 per year, but also the annual interest on Lady Burlington’s estates in Lincolnshire. There followed thirty years of contented marriage and forty-three of dignified widowhood. Eva Maria was Garrick’s constant companion at home and abroad, his supporter and adviser in theatrical affairs, a gracious hostess on social occasions, and a welcome guest in the grand houses the couple visited. Garrick’s social aggrandizement is inconceivable without her. Her taste and intelligence are discernible in the books and paintings they bought, in the way they furnished their houses, and between the lines of Garrick’s voluminous correspondence.
(They don’t say if these are going to stay on open access permanently, so it might be a good idea to nab them now if you don’t have access – although of course if you are in England and Wales you can get that through your local library.)
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