Shakespeare's King Lear, early proof: Museum Object and Cultural History

The object in the museum catalogue

Shakespeare's plays have engaged audiences for centuries, and his theatrical subject matter has influenced the visual arts as well. In the 1790s, London publishers John and Josiah Boydell opened the "Shakspeare Gallery" filled with paintings commissioned

to depict scenes from the plays. One hundred of these images were engraved as large prints and proved to be so popular that several editions were published, including an American edition in the 1840s.

King Lear, showing Lear in the storm from Act III, Scene iv, was engraved in 1793 by William Sharp (1749–1824) after the painting by Benjamin West (1738–1820). This dramatic scene was considered a powerful moral lesson representing energy of thought and action. The painting came to the United States in 1807, part of the collection of engineer Robert Fulton (1765–1815). It was exhibited in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York and is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Many collectors considered Sharp's engraving of King Lear the finest of the prints in Boydells' Shakspeare Gallery series. Vermont Congressman George Perkins Marsh and President Thomas Jefferson owned prints from the Shakspeare Gallery. This impression from the original English edition came to the Museum in 1979 as a bequest from the family of American artist Stephen Alonzo Schoff (1818–1904), a bank-note engraver who also produced prints in larger formats. Schoff studied art in Europe between 1839 and 1841, and he acquired a significant collection of European and American prints to serve as his working visual library. He owned this preliminary etched proof prepared in an acid bath and a final state of the print finished by hand with the burin, an engraver's cutting tool.

Materials, dates and provenance

• Date made: 1792
• referenced: Shakespeare, William
• publisher: Boydell, John
• publisher: Boydell, Josiah
• original artist: West, Benjamin
• maker: Sharp, William
• Object Name: print
• Other Terms: print; Etching
• Physical Description: paper (overall material)
• Physical Description: ink (overall material)
• Measurements: sheet: 45.75 cm x 58.8 cm; 18 in x 23 1/8 in
• Subject: Theater
• ID Number: 1979.0114.167
• accession number: 1979.0114
• catalog number: 1979.0114.167
• catalog number: 79.0114.167
• Credit Line: Estate of Leonard Hastings Schoff
• Data Source: National Museum of American History

Sources and reuse

Catalogue descriptions and facts adapted from National Museum of American History through the Smithsonian's official Open Access dataset. This record explicitly marks its metadata CC0 1.0; formatting and selection have been changed.