David Garrick and his wife Eva Maria Garrick (née Veigel) by his Temple to Shakespeare at Hampton

Johan Joseph Zoffany, 1733–1810

ca. 1762

Oil on canvas

Yale Center for British Art

A man and woman in 18th-century attire stand on the steps of a classical temple, with a river and landscape in the background. Two dogs are in the foreground. Zoffany’s tender picture of the actor David Garrick saying farewell to his Austrian wife, Eva Marie Veigel, is emblematic of an eighteenth-century ideal of marital love as affectionate and sentimental. Garrick is represented on the steps of his Temple to Shakespeare in the garden of his rural retreat at Hampton. Garrick idolized Shakespeare and created a virtual cult to his memory in the period. Here he says goodbye to Eva as a boatman waits on the river to take him back to his work in London, managing the Drury Lane Theatre and performing on stage. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection