LONDON — With the legendary actor-manager David Garrick serving as Shakespeare's high priest, bardolatry swept mid-18th-century England to the point that painters, too, reproduced the words and scenes that actors portrayed onstage. The artists' response on canvas, of course, was not entirely devotional. Prints of their paintings also earned them a pretty penny. In this they were helped by the public's growing familiarity with at least a dozen Shakespeare plays, notably "Hamlet," "King Lear," "Othello," "Romeo and Juliet" and "Richard III." Thus images of a crazed old man on a stormy heath and of a pale young man facing a ghost on a castle rampart and of teenage lovers embraced in death were immediately recognized by London theatergoers.

"The Weird Sisters" (1783) from "Macbeth" in the eye of Henry Fuseli.

Just as two centuries later Henry V might be thought to resemble Laurence Olivier and Prospero would be imagined with John Gielgud's features, Garrick and other leading actors of his day came to personify many Shakespearean characters. To paint Garrick in action therefore meant exploiting an 18th-century star system as much as paying tribute to the playwright.

And Garrick, for one, gleefully used prints of these paintings for his self-promotion.

But the Shakespeare art boom far outlived Garrick, who died in 1779. "Shakespeare in Art," an intriguing exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London through Oct. 19, traces the fashion between 1730 and 1860 as it continually adjusted to prevailing art styles, from Rococo and neo-Classical to Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite.

By the early 19th century the phenomenon had spread beyond England, with Shakespeare being adopted as a symbol of the Romantic movement in Western Europe. Even in France, which had long resisted the English dramatist, painters like Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Chassériau and Gustave Moreau all found inspiration in Shakespeare's plays and players.

But while the 70 paintings and drawings in this show mirror changing taste in art and theater, they also illustrate the difficulty of capturing either Shakespeare's verse or the drama of performance on canvas or paper. Whether read or seen, Shakespeare is constantly on the move; frozen in an image, poignant moments risk becoming lifeless.

James Barry's neo-classical vision of "King Lear Mourns the Death of Cordelia" (1774).

Charles Lamb, who with his sister Mary wrote "Tales From Shakespeare" in 1807, particularly disliked paintings of performances. "What injury did not Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery do me with Shakespeare?" he complained. "To have `heavy-handed Romney's Shakespeare . . . deaf-headed Reynolds's Shakespeare' instead of my and everybody's Shakespeare. To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen's portrait! To confine the illimitable." Still, after decades in which many of his plays had been mutilated in the name of simplicity or happy endings, the rediscovery of the real Shakespeare in the mid-18th century brought a sense of excitement and even national pride that proved contagious among English painters.

William Hogarth, that most perceptive of social observers, was among the first to respond in 1730 with "Falstaff Examining His Troops" from "Henry IV, Part II," which can be seen here.

Hogarth's better-known 1745 portrait of "Garrick as Richard III" was not lent for this show, but that play is well represented: Nathaniel Dance's later version of Garrick in the role hangs beside Samuel Drummond's 1814 "Edmund Keane as Richard III" and Charles Robert Leslie's 1813 "George Frederick Cooke as Richard III." "Macbeth" is another popular subject, with the dagger scene of Act II illustrated in Johann Zoffany's 1768 "David Garrick as Macbeth and Hannah Pritchard as Lady Macbeth."

In 1789 John Boydell, who later stirred Lamb's wrath, organized a Shakespeare Gallery with the idea of commissioning paintings of 72 scenes from plays. By the time the gallery closed in 1803, 56 had been painted and engraved for printing.

Some painters, though, decided to recreate Shakespearean moments without reference to the stage, going directly from page to canvas. Some opted for Poussin-like neo-classicism, as in James Barry's "King Lear Mourns the Death of Cordelia" and Dance's "Timon of Athens." But others released their imagination, none more than Henry Fuseli, the most bardolatrous of artists, whose 1783 "Weird Sisters" from "Macbeth" remains one of the most striking Shakespearean images in art.

This exhibition also includes Fuseli's "Gertrude, Hamlet and the Ghost of Hamlet's Father" and his "Vision of Queen Katherine," the moment when Henry VIII's rejected wife is visited by spirits. This scene from "Henry VIII," a play rarely performed today but popular in the late 18th and 19th centuries, is again evoked by William Blake, whose pen and watercolor works frequently portray the supernatural in Shakespeare.

In France, where Shakespeare's work was only just making its mark in the early 19th century, painters also preferred to imagine scenes from his plays. Delacroix's "Hamlet Sees His Father's Ghost," his "Death of Ophelia" and his "Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard," all drenched in Romanticism, underline this artist's strong response to "Hamlet." Moreau was in turn drawn in 1851 to a sleepwalking "Lady Macbeth" emerging from blood-red drapes.

Around the same time in England, the Pre-Raphaelite movement embraced Shakespeare with renewed passion. Unfortunately, perhaps the single most famous Shakespearean image in art, John Everett Millais's "Ophelia," has remained a few miles from here at Tate Britain, but Millais's "Ferdinand Lured by Ariel" from "The Tempest" is on display, while other works by Frederick, Lord Leighton and William Holman Hunt keep the Pre-Raphaelite flag flying. Also reconnecting art to the theater are scenery designs by the Grieve family from the mid-19th century, when theaters competed for audiences as much with the extravagance of their productions as with the renown of their actors. Finally, the bardolatry theme comes full circle with a section on latter-day images of Shakespeare himself, like John Faed's 1850 "Shakespeare and His Friends at the Mermaid Tavern" and William Blake's "Imaginary Portrait of Shakespeare." But it is "Sir Walter Scott at Shakespeare's Tomb," attributed to David Roberts, that best summarizes the exhibition. The image of Scott bowing before the bust of Shakespeare in Holy Trinity in Stratford-Upon-Avon well symbolizes the generations of artists who also joined the cult.

Johann Zoffany's "Charles Macklin as Shylock" (1768).

The New York Times
Septiembre - 2003