And Now They Never Meet in Grove or Green (1908): Art, History and Details

And Now They Never Meet in Grove or Green (1908) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Arthur Rackham (British, 1867–1939).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This drawing is one of 40 made by Arthur Rackham to illustrate William Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. It depicts the confrontation between Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, that takes place in the woods outside of Athens in act 2, scene 1. The artist painted a stormy sky looming over the magical couple to echo the story's mood. Rackham worked during a golden age of book illustration in England, around the turn of the 20th century, and the images he produced for literary works influenced future productions of Shakespeare's work.

Object facts

• Title: And Now They Never Meet in Grove or Green
• Date: 1908
• Creator attribution: Arthur Rackham (British, 1867–1939)
• Culture: England, 20th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and black ink and watercolor with scraping and minute touches of white gouache on artist's illustration board
• Dimensions: Sheet: 38.6 x 27 cm (15 3/16 x 10 5/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - British
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1954.651

A detail from the museum

Arthur Rackham was one of the first book illustrators to take advantage of color halftone printing, augmenting his ink drawings with subtle washes of transparent hues.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Don Hunter

Further reading listed by the museum

• Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream: With Illustrations by Arthur Rackham, R.W.S. London: William Heinemann, 1908.
• Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003.
• Lemonedes, Heather. British Drawings: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Exh. Cat. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.