Fluellen Making Pistol Eat the Leek (Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 5, Scene 1)

Fluellen Making Pistol Eat the Leek (Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 5, Scene 1)

Robert Mitchell Meadows

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bunbury's "Shakespeare" consisted of twenty-prints published between 1792 and 1797, issued periodically in sets of four. The publisher Thomas Macklin was inspired by the success of Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery to open a rival Poets Gallery in 1787. He then commissioned a set of large watercolors from Bunbury of comic Shakesperean subjects with related prints issued by subscription. The artist was the younger son in an old gentry family who had amused fellow students with comic drawings at Westminster School in London, then at Cambridge University. He became a friend of Thomas Rowlandson, who etched many Bunbury designs. Most of Bunbury's income came, however, from army positions and the patronage of the Duke of York, whom he served as equerry. The Shakespeare series of watercolors rank among the artist's most ambitious and soon belonged to the Duchess of York. Robert Mitchell Meadows, a follower of Francesco Bartolozzi, produced this stipple engraving of a scene in "Henry V." While waiting to go into battle in France, Falstaff’s followers begin to annoy one another and the outrageous Pistol is here shown forced to eat a leek (the symbol of Wales), after mercilessly mocking his companion, the Welshman Fluellen.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fluellen Making Pistol Eat the Leek (Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 5, Scene 1)Fluellen Making Pistol Eat the Leek (Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 5, Scene 1)Fluellen Making Pistol Eat the Leek (Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 5, Scene 1)Fluellen Making Pistol Eat the Leek (Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 5, Scene 1)Fluellen Making Pistol Eat the Leek (Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 5, 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.