Before the Duke's Palace–Rosalind, Celia, Orlando, the Duke & Attendants (Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 1, Scene 2)

Before the Duke's Palace–Rosalind, Celia, Orlando, the Duke & Attendants (Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 1, Scene 2)

William Satchwell Leney

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Smirke's image centers on Rosalind's first encounter with Orlando in As You Like It. The image was conceived for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, launched in 1786 as a publishing-cum-exhibition scheme that included a new illustrated edition of the plays, sets of large and small engravings, and a gallery on London's Pall Mall. The latter opened in 1789 with thirty-four paintings and contained about one hundred and seventy works the time Boydell went bankrupt and auctioned the contents in 1805–his print sales plummeted when Napoleon blocaded European ports. This print belongs to an American reissue of 1852 spearheaded by Shearjashub Spooner, a New York dental surgeon, writer and art scholar who acquired Boydell's heavily worn plates and had them reworked. Printed on thick cream colored paper, the New York edition added small numbers in the lower left margin, this being number 26.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Before the Duke's Palace–Rosalind, Celia, Orlando, the Duke & Attendants (Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 1, Scene 2)Before the Duke's Palace–Rosalind, Celia, Orlando, the Duke & Attendants (Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 1, Scene 2)Before the Duke's Palace–Rosalind, Celia, Orlando, the Duke & Attendants (Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 1, Scene 2)Before the Duke's Palace–Rosalind, Celia, Orlando, the Duke & Attendants (Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 1, Scene 2)Before the Duke's Palace–Rosalind, Celia, Orlando, the Duke & Attendants (Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 1, Scene 2)

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.