Queen Mab's Cave (after 1846): Art, History and Details

Queen Mab's Cave (after 1846) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775–1851).

The work and its context

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

This work is a reduced copy of a painting first exhibited by Turner at the British Institution in 1846 that passed, with the rest of his immense bequest to the nation, into the collections of the National Gallery and finally, in 1954, the Tate Gallery. Several lines from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Turner's manuscript poem "Fallacies of Hope" were appended to the title in the British Institution catalogue, but they did little to explicate the nearly unintelligible concoction of fairies and Welsh ruins that make up this composition. Copies of Queen Mab's Cave by anonymous artists are abundant.

Object facts

• Title: Queen Mab's Cave
• Date: after 1846
• Creator attribution: Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775–1851)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Unframed: 73 x 89.5 cm (28 3/4 x 35 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1916.1036

A detail from the museum

Queen Mab is a miniature fairy from English folklore who inspires dreams and plays pranks on people during the night. Shakespeare refers to her in both Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade

Further reading listed by the museum

• Argencourt, Louise d', and Roger Diederen. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 4. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.
• "The Wade Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 1 (1917): 3-12.

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.