The Self-Portrait by James Hall

Author:James Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd

7.

AT THE CROSSROADS

James Barry, Self-Portrait with Dominique Lefèvre and James Paine the Younger, c. 1767 (detail), see full picture

IN 1761, JOSHUA REYNOLDS (1723–92) painted an allegorical portrait of the most famous actor of the day, David Garrick. Garrick between Comedy and Tragedy shows the actor standing in verdant woodland having his arms pulled by female allegories of Comedy and Tragedy, the former smiling and scantily clad, and practically ripping his clothes, the latter severe and veiled, and pointing upward to higher things. Garrick’s body language is what we would now call ‘conflicted’, so while his head turns towards Tragedy and his arched eyebrows vault up his forehead, he is smiling even more broadly than Comedy, and his torso turns towards her. Perhaps his head says ‘Tragedy’, and his heart says ‘Comedy’.

The picture is a witty and necessarily inconclusive variation on the theme of ‘Hercules at the Crossroads’, or ‘The Choice of Hercules’, in which the Greek hero is shown caught between female allegories of Virtue and Vice, still unsure whether to stride off and perform heroic labours (which he does), or to remain a pampered fornicating sybarite. This subject had been depicted many times since the Renaissance, and Federico Zuccaro painted ‘The Choice of Hercules’ on the ceiling of his own house in Rome, with a stirring inscription telling the viewer to take the arduous path of Virtue. But Reynolds’s picture is the first version to put a particular artist in the place of Hercules.

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