Toward a Picturesque Illusion: -The Cultural Environment in the Collaboration of David Garrick and Philippe de Loutherbourg-

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to explore the cultural environment from which David Garrick’s and Philippe de Loutherbourg’s ideas on naturalness toward a picturesque illusion were forged in the 18th-century theatrical practices. Their ideal collaboration brought together the techniques and effects of the illusionistic pictures to the London stage and constituted a new vision, which inspired the realistic movement in the next century. For my investigation, following Michel Foucault’s and Joseph Roach’s assertions, I illuminate Garrick’s and de Loutherbourg’s perspectives on ‘nature’ and their contemporaries’ arts as the cultural environment of the time to have the validation of our pattern of knowledge on naturalness. Focusing on Garrick’s view on an actor as a “moving statue” and interests in garden, and de Loutherbourg’s landscape painting and Romanticism, this study scrutinizes how they develop the picturesque illusion on the sage through their collaboration in Drury Lane. As the cultural environment of their time, I research the universal passions systematized of the French baroque painter Charles Le Brun, Thomas Gainsborough’s paintings as a seedbed of the romantic movement of landscape painting, Capability Brown’s gardens as the ideal of the English informal (natural) gardening, and Claude Lorrain’s paintings as an example of Garrick’s concept of moving statue and de Loutherbourg’s idea of natural landscape. The contrivance of the landscape gardener and the landscape painter affected Garrick to envision natural scenery for his stage at the Drury Lane. Garrick’s impression on the new garden urged himself to hire de Loutherbourg who was one of the finest landscape painters. De Loutherbourg achieved the breaking up of perspectives which had held the stage for so long by the greatly increased use of separate pieces. He got rid of permanent settings on the stage for the flexible stage and the stronger resemblance to nature. Garrick and de Loutherbourg, through their collaboration, put the newly created reality on the stage. Their natural acting and natural scenery set the new paradigm about naturalness in theatrical movements. Their collaboration for the picturesque illusion on stage anticipated photographic Realism even though it requests the investigation from a whole new concept of nature.