Boydell's Shakespeare

A Shakespeare illustration begins by choosing what a scene will look like. Boydell's project made that choice a collaboration between painters and engravers, then gave the paintings an exhibition life of their own. The result belongs to the history of the illustrated book and to the history of Shakespeare as a public cultural figure.

The paintings reunited

The Folger Shakespeare Library's exhibition Imagining Shakespeare: Mythmaking and Storytelling in the Regency Era ran from October 4, 2025, to August 2, 2026. It brought together fourteen paintings from the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, displayed together for the first time since 1805. These were scenes from the plays painted by leading artists of eighteenth-century England.

The Folger described the gallery as contributing to the idea of Shakespeare as a genius from birth: the Bard, a symbol of British imperialism and economic power. Illustration here had a cultural weight beyond the subject of an individual canvas. The stories Shakespeare created were accompanied by stories created about him; the reputation of the writer became part of the history of pictures made from his work.

An illustrated edition becomes a gallery

John Boydell wanted an illustrated scholarly edition of Shakespeare's plays. His painting commissions went to artists including Joshua Reynolds, Angelica Kauffmann, Benjamin West, George Romney, and Henry Fuseli. Reynolds was then president of the Royal Academy. Choosing a scene for a painting is already an act of interpretation: a stretch of dramatic action has to become a single visible subject, with its own emphasis and arrangement.

John and his nephew Josiah founded the London gallery. Exhibiting the paintings was almost an afterthought in the project, but the Shakespeare Gallery opened in 1789 during London's fall social season. Its first display comprised thirty-four paintings drawn from twenty-one plays. That gave individual scenes a place within a larger gathering of Shakespearean subjects, an encounter with the plays organized through pictures.

Painting into print

The engravers included Caroline Watson, Francesco Bartolozzi, James Collier, and James Heath. The Folger's account of the painting and engraving commissions notes that engravers were typically paid far more to engrave the paintings than the artists were paid to paint them. Translation into print was a substantial artistic commission in its own right.

An engraving after a painting has two kinds of authorship: the conception of a subject and its realization in a printed image.

The later theatrical periodical drawing offered another route from Shakespeare to paper. John Jellicoe and Herbert Railton's Macbeth at the Lyceum dates from 1889. In its January 2026 collection feature, the Folger described their full-page drawings for English periodicals showing scenes from current London productions. It characterized the work as representative of a high point in pen-and-ink drawing. The Folger's holdings extend beyond this example, including further drawings by Jellicoe as well as work by other artists. A picture made from a production and a painting commissioned for an illustrated edition start from different relationships with the play: a theatrical event on one side, a publishing project on the other.

Boydell's gallery guides were an early form of exhibition catalog. They frequently needed reprinting during the season, which the Folger identified as evidence of the gallery's popularity.

The dispersal

The gallery closed sixteen years after opening, and its collection was dispersed at auction in 1805. By then it held 173 paintings by thirty-five artists. Almost half the paintings were life-size, giving the enterprise a physical scale as well as a numerical one. Only a third of the works are known to survive.