Imagining Shakespeare on Canvas

The Folger’s exhibition Imagining Shakespeare: Mythmaking and Storytelling in the Regency Era is a time machine back to 18th-century London and John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. Located in fashionable Pall Mall, the Boydell Gallery—the first public art museum—was visited by everyone who was anyone, from Jane Austen to the Prince of Wales. Its walls were hung floor to ceiling with paintings of pivotal scenes from Shakespeare’s plays by the leading artists of the day. Prints were sold for those wanting to take the Gallery home with them.

But why make a gallery devoted to Shakespeare? And who was Boydell?

A prominent print seller and publisher, Boydell had spent his career working to improve the quality of English engraving so that it could compete with European prints on the continental market. One of his strategies was to pay engravers significantly higher fees for commissioned work. Later, after almost 50 years in the business, Boydell wrote that English engraving had achieved “the perfection of the art.”

But he was less enthusiastic about English painting, with its focus on portrait painting—and he wasn’t alone. By the late 18th century, England had become the economic powerhouse of Europe. But in the arts, many felt that England lagged behind the Continent.

To develop a school of British history painting, Boydell found the perfect subject in Shakespeare. Boydell had considered Milton, Spenser, and the Bible, but he believed that Shakespeare’s “creative imagination” offered the power to “do things that Nature would have done, had she ov’rstepp’d her natural limits.”

It didn’t hurt that Shakespeare’s popularity was on the rise in the 18th century. There was a growing market for his likeness—and that of the actors who brought his plays to life—on everything from vases and snuff boxes to porcelain figurines and tea caddies.

Boydell decided to create an illustrated scholarly edition of Shakespeare’s plays. He commissioned paintings from the leading artists of the day, including Joshua Reynolds (then president of the Royal Academy), Angelica Kauffmann, Benjamin West, George Romney, and Henry Fuseli. He also selected the most skilled engravers, including Caroline Watson, Francesco Bartolozzi, James Collier, and James Heath. The engravers were typically paid far more money to engrave the paintings than the artists were paid to paint them. Henry Fuseli received £210 for painting a scene from The Tempest, while Peter Simon received £315 to engrave it.

Almost as an afterthought, Boydell declared he would exhibit the paintings “in a Gallery built on Purpose.” The Shakespeare Gallery opened in 1789 during London’s fall social season. On its walls hung 34 paintings from 21 plays. When the Gallery closed 16 years later, it had grown to 173 paintings. Boydell’s guides—an early form of the exhibition catalog—frequently had to be reprinted mid-season, proof of the Gallery’s popularity. Ditto the opening of rival galleries, from a Poets’ Gallery to an Irish Shakespeare Gallery to a short-lived Milton Gallery.

What Boydell could not have predicted was the Napoleonic Wars. Suddenly, all Boydell’s European markets were eliminated. To pay his debts, he was forced to petition Parliament to approve a lottery to raise funds. Every ticket holder was guaranteed prints and one ticket holder would win all the paintings—that winner, William Tassie, sold the paintings at auction several months later.

Today, the Folger holds the world’s largest group of paintings from the Boydell Gallery. Imagining Shakespeare marks the first time that these 14 paintings have been shown together since the Gallery closed in 1805. The paintings include the Folger’s largest artwork: James Northcote’s 11-foot-wide scene from the final act of Romeo and Juliet. Others show scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, and King Lear. George Romney’s life-size The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions highlights the era’s notion of Shakespeare as a “native genius” from birth.

The paintings in the Boydell Gallery were a fresh telling of the stories in Shakespeare plays. But the Gallery as a whole told a new story about Shakespeare himself. Boydell sought to elevate British painting, and in the process, further enshrined Shakespeare as the Bard, an enduring national icon and export of the British Empire that continues two centuries later.