After Pompeo Batoni

Anonymous sale, Christie's, London, 29 October 2008, lot 76 (as Circle of Batoni). 

A copy of the painting by Pompeo Batoni, painted in Rome, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.  

David Garrick (1717-1779), the most celebrated British actor and playwright of his generation, travelled in Italy in 1763-5. His portrait by Batoni was made as a gift for Sir Richard Kaye (1736-1809), in exchange for an antique gem that Kaye had found at the Baths of Caracalla. Garrick holds an illustrated edition (1736) of Terence's Comedies, with a page showing the masks for the Andria copied from a manuscript in the Vatican Library.