The Garrick Club's art collection - online catalogue

Most clubs have an art collection, whether it is a half-dozen much-loved if battered old portraits, or a vast treasure trove of material kept under tight control for pressure and climate, in a vault. Arguably the largest art collection held by any London club is that of the Garrick - a huge assemblage built up over nearly two centuries, covering many facets of drama, including portraits of actors, typescripts, libretti, and ephemera as singular as snuff boxes and walking sticks.

A recent scheme of the Garrick’s is the online cataloguing of this collection on a publicly-accessible Garrick Club Collections website, which can be found at https://garrick.ssl.co.uk - clicking on “Collections” in the top-right-hand corner will take you through to the catalogue.

This is a very welcome initiative. In the past, the Garrick has periodically published catalogues of its paintings (in 1909, 1936 and 1997 respectively, with the latter updated in 2002), and of some specific holdings, such as the Richard Bebb Collection of figures, sculptures and paintings in 2001. However, a great many items of ephemera have not previously been covered by these catalogues, and so in many cases this new website offers their first public glimpse. It is not unusual for clubs to offer their members a digitised art catalogue in this way; but it is almost unique for a London club to offer public access in this way - particularly to such a large collection.

The site remains a work-in-progress, with new artefacts being regularly added - for instance, at the time of writing, there are already scans of some 741 drawings in the Garrick collection. Each catalogued item enjoys a detailed entry, with a page of its own, and a high-resolution photograph. The catalogue is hosted by CollectionsIndex + Collections Online, whose experience includes delivering similar projects for the British Museum, and a range of other archives, institutions and public bodies. The Garrick retains copyright on all material hosted on the site, but encourages academic and scholarly study of its collections.

Details of the Garrick’s previously-published art catalogues can be found on my London clubs bibliography page, along with the art catalogues for the Athenæum, Brooks’s, Caledonian Club, National Liberal Club, Oriental Club, and Oxford & Cambridge Club. (Most are in self-contained volumes, easily identifiable by their titles; while the Brooks’s art catalolgue is a lengthy appendix taking up half of Sebag-Montefiore & Mordaunt Crook’s 250th anniversary history from 2014.)

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