King Lear Weeping Over the Body of Cordelia (Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 5, Scene 3)

Francis Legat

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Legat's print reproduces Barry's tragic representation of King Lear mourning his daughter, the original nine by twelve foot canvas painted for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery in 1786-7, now at Tate Britain. Four years residence in Rome two decades earlier gave the artist a deep admiration for Italian art, and his heroically scaled king recalls Michelangelo's Prophet Jeremiah from the Sistine Ceiling, while Kent's elegantly muscled form echoes Parmigianino. The setting includes chalk cliffs near Dover, mentioned in the play, and Druidic temples resembling Stonehenge. Setting aside the happy ending introduced by Naham Tate in 1681, an adaption that held the London stage through the early 19th century, Barry represents Shakespeare's original heartrending conception.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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.

Metropolitan Museum of Art