The Folger art collection includes paintings and sculptures, works on paper, illustrated books, craft items, and more. Only part of the art collection relates directly to Shakespeare and his works, but even so, it is the world’s largest collection of Shakespearean art. Some highlights of the collection are shown here, with more information about the scope of our art collection below.
An overview of the art collection
Paintings
The Folger has about 200 paintings. A few date to Shakespeare’s day, like the Plimpton "Sieve" portrait of Elizabeth I by George Gower, dated 1579. Most are from the 18th and 19th centuries, including paintings by Henry Fuseli, Benjamin West, George Romney, and Thomas Nast. Among its most important paintings is Fuseli's Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head, from 1793. More than half of the Folger paintings depict scenes from Shakespeare's plays.
Other Folger paintings are portraits of Shakespeare, perhaps the largest such collection in the world. Only two images of Shakespeare are widely considered authentic, in the sense that friends or family members must have approved them—the engraving in the First Folio and the memorial bust at Stratford. The Folger portraits, instead, show wishful thinking about the identities of now-unknown men and how artists over time imagined Shakespeare's appearance.
Works on paper
The Folger collection houses an estimated 80,000 works on paper, including drawings, sketches, watercolors, photographs, and prints. These include more than 2,000 works by the 17th-century artist Wenceslaus Hollar, about 600 in the art collection and the rest in period books. The Folger collection of drawings by George Romney is the second largest in North America and the third largest in the world.
The collection also holds original works on paper by George Cruikshank, Francis Hayman, and John Massey Wright and early prints by Hans Vredeman de Vries, the van de Passe family, Abraham Bosse, and Romeyn de Hooghe. About 8,000 prints from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries depict scenes from Shakespeare's plays. You can find many of them in the Digital Image Collection by play, act, and scene, or by character; you can also browse images from the plays through their pages in Shakespeare’s Works.
Books and sculpture
The Folger's collection of art books includes fine-press books, comic books, extra-illustrated volumes, and artists' books. Extra-illustration, which was popular in the 19th century, means adding other items, like portraits and letters, to an existing book, sometimes in such quantities that the book was rebound in multiple volumes. Artists' books, often produced in only one copy, are works of modern art, sometimes resembling sculpture more than traditional book structure.
The most important sculpture in the collection is Louis François Roubiliac's terracotta figure of Shakespeare, dated 1757. It is the scale model for the life-size marble statue now at the British Library.