Boydell Shakespeare Gallery
The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in London, England, was the first stage of a three-part project initiated in November 1786 by engraver and publisher John Boydell in an effort to foster a school of British history painting. In addition to the establishment of the gallery, Boydell planned to produce an illustrated edition of William Shakespeare's plays and a folio of prints based upon a series of paintings by different contemporary painters. During the 1790s the London gallery that showed the original paintings emerged as the project's most popular element.
Joshua Reynolds' Puck (1789), painted for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, is modelled after Parmigianino's Madonna with St. Zachary, the Magdalen, and St. John
William Hogarth's portrait of David Garrick as Richard III (1745)
George Steevens, one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of the 18th century and the editor of the Boydell Shakespeare edition
Richard Westall's Ophelia, engraved by J. Parker for Boydell's illustrated edition of Shakespeare's Dramatic Works
John Boydell was an English publisher noted for his reproductions of engravings. He helped alter the trade imbalance between Britain and France in engravings and initiated an English tradition in the art form. A former engraver himself, Boydell promoted the interests of artists as well as patrons and as a result his business prospered.
John Boydell (1801), after William Beechey
Boydell's "View taken near the Store House at Deptford", later published in his own Collection of Views in England and Wales (1770)
St. Antony of Padua, preaching to the Birds. Wood engraving after Salvator Rosa
Boydell eventually made £15,000 from William Woollett's 1776 print of Benjamin West's Death of General Wolfe (1770), much of it from exports.
