Boydell's Illustrations of Shakespeare, Vol. I: The Alto-relievo (Shakespeare between Poetry and Painting) (after Thomas Banks)

From 1789 to 1805, a grand building at 52 Pall Mall in London housed John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, a display of paintings by Britain’s leading artists illustrating the dramas of Britain’s greatest playwright. Visitors to the Shakespeare Gallery were greeted at the entrance by a marble relief sculpture by Thomas Banks: Shakespeare Between the Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting. The engraving after this sculpture served in turn as the frontispiece to Boydell’s Illustrations of Shakespeare, a massive print-publishing project that brought reproductions of the paintings into middle-class households (but ultimately caused Boydell’s financial ruin). The message of Banks’s sculpture, Smith’s engraving, and Boydell’s project more generally was that Shakespeare, the National Poet, could unite British dramatic poetry and painting and effect a transformation in artistic taste. While the allegorical figures in the composition were praised for their graceful execution, the face of Shakespeare has been criticized for an alleged resemblance to, of all people, George Washington.