William Shakespeare

Samuel Ireland

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This etching reproduces a supposed self-portrait sketch by Shakespeare actually created by William Henry Ireland during a famous forgery scandal of the 1790s. Ireland faked a cache of letters, documents, and drafts of plays calculated to shed light on the Bard's life and beliefs, and claimed to have found them in an old trunk. Taken in by his son, Samuel Ireland published "Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments Printed Under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare" (1796), using the present image as an illustration. It was said to have been inserted in a letter and there described as a "whysycalle conceyte." The Shakespeare authority Edmond Malone soon debunked Ireland's claims and described the portrait as "most truly whimsical, being a miserable drawing of our poet done by himself with a pen, from Martin Droeshout's print of him engraved seven years after his death" (see 17.3.756-1108 for the latter).

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