Shakespeare Gallery

The Romantic Illustration Network Shakespeare Gallery

The Romantic Illustration Network would like to express its gratitude to Professor Fred Burwick, who provided us with the negatives for the high-resolution digital images of the engravings displayed below.

The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, 1789-1805

An exhibition of paintings devoted exclusively to scenes from the dramatic works of Shakespeare was opened to the London populace in June, 1789. The Shakespeare Gallery was situated in a huge building at 52 Pall Mall. Formerly occupied by Dodsley’s bookshop, the building had been rebuilt under the supervision of George Dance the younger. The exterior was sheathed in copper; the entrance featured a relief of Shakespeare reclining against a rock, with the Dramatic Muse to his right and the Genius of Painting to his left. The exhibition suite on the ground floor was 130 feet long; the three rooms upstairs provided a wall area of over 4,000 square feet for exhibiting the paintings. Obviously there was room for many more than the thirty-four paintings which were displayed for the first visitors. The number of paintings doubled the ensuing year, and each spring an exhibition of newly completed paintings was announced, so that the Shakespeare Gallery, before it finally closed in 1805, eventually housed 167 canvases by thirty-three artists.

[Excerpt from the Introduction to The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, by Frederick Burwick]

Click on the thumbnails below to access larger versions of the images, and to view the full-sized image. Images are arranged alphabetically by play, and new plays will be added over the coming months, so do keep checking back here.

Mary L. Shannon

Dustin Frazier Wood

Creative Commons Licence
The Romantic Illustration Network Shakespeare Gallery by Frederick Burwick and the Romantic Illustration Network is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Digitised by the University of Roehampton.

UnivRoehamptonlogo

Front Matter to the Boydells’ two-volume Collection of Prints

The Alto Relievo in Front of the Shakspeare Gallery, Pall-Mall
Volume I Title Page
His Most Gracious Majesty King George the Third
The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions
Volume II Title Page
Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Charlotte
SHAKSPEARE Nursed by Tragedy and Comedy

Antony and Cleopatra

Act III, Scene IX

 

 As You Like It

Act I, Scene II
Act II, Scene I
Act II, Scene VII (a)
Act II, Scene VII (b)
Act II, Scene VII (c)
Act II, Scene VII (d)
Act II, Scene VII (e)
Act II, Scene VII (f)
Act II, Scene VII (g)
Act IV, Scene III
Act V, Scene IV

Comedy of Errors

Act V, Scene I

Coriolanus

Act V, Scene III

Cymbeline

Act I, Scene II
Act III, Scene IV
Act III, Scene VI

Hamlet

Act I, Scene IV
Act IV, Scene V

Julius Caesar

Act IV, Scene III

 

King Henry the Fourth, Part I

Act II, Scene II
Act II, Scene IV
Act III, Scene I
Act V, Scene IV

King Henry the Fourth, Part II

Act II, Scene IV
Act III, Scene II
Act IV, Scene IV
Act IV, Scene IV

King Henry the Fifth

Act II, Scene II

King Henry the Sixth, Part I

Act II, Scene III
Act II, Scene IV
Act II, Scene V

 

King Henry the Sixth, Part II

Act I, Scene IV
Act III, Scene III

 

King Henry the Sixth, Part III

Act I, Scene III
Act II, Scene V
Act IV, Scene V
Act V, Scene VII

 

King Henry the Eighth

Act I, Scene III
Act III, Scene I
Act IV, Scene II
Act V, Scene IV

 

King Lear

Act I, Scene I
Act III, Scene IV
Act V, Scene III

 

King Richard the Third

Act III, Scene I
Act IV, Scene III
Act IV, Scene III

 

Measure for Measure

Act II, Scene I
Act V, Scene I

Merchant of Venice

Act II, Scene V
Act V, Scene I

Merry Wives of Windsor

Act I, Scene I
Act II, Scene I
Act III, Scene III
Act IV, Scene II
Act V, Scene V

Much Ado About Nothing

Act III, Scene I
Act IV, Scene I
Act IV, Scene II

Othello

Act II, Scene I
Act V, Scene II
Act V, Scene II

 

Romeo and Juliet

Act I, Scene V
Act IV, Scene V
Act V, Scene III

 

 

Taming of the Shrew

Induction, Scene II
Act II, Scene II

The Tempest

Act I, Scene I
Act I, Scene II
Act IV, Scene I
Act V, Scene I

Timon of Athens

Act IV, Scene III

 

 

Titus Andronicus

Act IV, Scene I

 

 

Troilus & Cressida

Act II, Scene II
Act V, Scene II

 

Two Gentlemen of Verona

Act V, Scene III

Featured Post

‘One More Unfortunate’: How Illustrations of Thomas Hood’s ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ shaped attitudes towards Waterloo Bridge Suicides in the Victorian Era

Posted on by

by Cecilia Neil-Smith Cecilia is entering her second year of PhD study in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. Her project focuses on mermaids and sirens as figures of indeterminate gender in the art and literature … Continue reading →

An Illustrated Antislavery Song: Music with a Mission?

Posted on by

by Rachel Cross Rachel Cross is a PhD candidate at Cardiff University whose area of research is Victorian illustrated songs. Her work investigates how the intersections between the three media of illustration, text and music reveal new insight into key … Continue reading →

Recent Posts

Event Announcement! Join Professor Ian Haywood for his talk on Keats and LSD

Posted on by
Reply

 (SPOILER ALERT – it’s not the type you think!)

This talk will take a fresh look at one of Keats’s best-known and well-loved poems, ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’ (1816). This sonnet, first published in Leigh Hunt’s ‘The Examiner’, marked Keats’s debut as an aspiring poet, and critics have universally praised the poem’s celebration of the joys of reading the classics in translation. Keats was from a humble ‘Cockney’ background and this poem’s frank confession of his literary ambitions and educational limitations is widely admired as a display of Romantic sensibility. However, the perspective of LSD (spoiler alert – it is not what you think) produces a very different interpretation of the poem, and takes us into challenging cultural, geographical and ethical regions, with some profound implications for British Romanticism as a whole. Join Professor Ian Haywood to learn more.

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 18:30 – 20:00 GMT

Keats House10 Keats Grove London NW3 2RR

To book tickets and for more information, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/keats-and-lsd-tickets-1205517889459

  1. Discovering the Legacy of the the Boydell Shakespeare Prints: A Collector’s Experience Leave a reply
  2. REVIEW: The History of Press Graphics 1819-1921: The Golden Age of Graphic Journalism by Alexander Roob. Reviewed by Katie Snow. Leave a reply
  3. Women Printmakers in the Eighteenth Century: exploring the print and publishing life of Letitia Byrne in Women in Print Leave a reply
  4. “With feelings which I cannot describe”: How Illustrators of Fin-de-Siècle Romance Fiction Depicted Wonders Surpassing Human Description Leave a reply
  5. Printed Afterlives: Joshua Reynolds’ ‘Johnson Arguing’ portrait, 1769 Leave a reply
  6. Introduction, Twitter launch and Call for Contributions 1 Reply
  7. Queen Caroline in Caricature – August 1821 1 Reply
  8. Roehampton Research Seminar, 9 December 2020 1-2pm 1 Reply
  9. Queen Caroline in Caricature -November 1820 2 Replies