Queen Catherine, Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Campeius (Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, Act 3, Scene 1)

Queen Catherine, Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Campeius (Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, Act 3, Scene 1)

Robert Thew

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Peter's work encapsulates a Catherine of Aragon's angry meeting with Cardinal Wolsey in King Henry VIII. It 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 impression 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 80.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Queen Catherine, Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Campeius (Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, Act 3, Scene 1)Queen Catherine, Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Campeius (Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, Act 3, Scene 1)Queen Catherine, Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Campeius (Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, Act 3, Scene 1)Queen Catherine, Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Campeius (Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, Act 3, Scene 1)Queen Catherine, Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Campeius (Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, Act 3, Scene 1)

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.