Fuseli and the Boydell enterprise

Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), Swiss-born and with a somewhat iconoclastic temperament, had this feather in his cap: he helped raise the stature of Shakespearean illustration with a prolific outpouring of paintings that reflected his own tumultuous inner nature. Fuseli's work unquestionably furthered the genre of theatrical painting as distinct from the type of historical painting that had characterized much of the previous century.

And evidently nothing inspired him to reach for the brush more than Shakespeare: Fuseli was to become a prominent contributor to John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery in London's Pall Mall. The gallery enjoyed a high-profile yet short-lived run, from May 1789 until 1803, by which time the Napoleonic menace had wreaked havoc on a great many British commercial enterprises. At least Fuseli's works were in good company: Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West, among others, also had contributed paintings on Shakespearean themes to the gallery.

Boydell's overall plan had involved using the gallery not only as a profitable venture in itself, but as a publicity vehicle for the subscription sale of sets of Shakespeare's works featuring fine engravings done from the Gallery paintings. Evidently, some of the engravings turned out to be somewhat less than fine, and the production of the entire set of works slowed to a crawl, creating a great deal of unfavorable publicity for Boydell. Ultimately, the works of Fuseli, Reynolds, and the others were auctioned off in 1805.

Despite the gallery's demise, Fuseli continued to create paintings of Shakespearean scenes; they clearly appealed to his sense of the dramatic. Pictured above is his Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (1812, oil on canvas, now at the Tate in London). In his younger days, Fuseli had done a watercolor of the famous actor David Garrick in this same scene; the version above shows the interest he developed in the starkly rendered human form. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, he could hardly have chosen a darker moment.