Lichfield on the main routes from London to the north-west and Birmingham to the north-east. It also became a centre of great intellectual activity, being the home of many famous people including Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward; this prompted Johnson's remark that Lichfield was "a city of philosophers". In the 1720s Daniel Defoe described Lichfield as 'a fine, neat, well-built, and indifferent large city', the principal town in the region after Chester. During the late 18th and early 19th century much of the medieval city was rebuilt with the red-brick Georgian style buildings still to be seen
David Garrick Between Tragedy and Comedy Virtue, Garrick starts to succumb to the more immodestly dressed muse of Comedy. It also differs from traditional compositions of this scene, which generally feature detached full-length figures. David Garrick was famous as both a tragedian and comedian, and his earliest known association with the Muses of Tragedy and Comedy was in a 1747 poem by William Whitehead. In 1761, the same year Reynolds finished his painting of Garrick, a pamphlet with the signatures of the Muses of Comedy and Tragedy praised Garrick's theatrical achievements. The historian David Mannings has suggested that the painting's composition was inspired by Guido Reni's