King Lear

In May 1805 the paintings of John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery were sold at Christie's in London. Boydell, a print publisher, had commissioned them in the late 1780s from the leading painters in Britain so that engravings could be made and sold, and the long war with France had ruined his trade with the Continent. This canvas, one of the biggest in his gallery at almost three metres high and more than three and a half wide, went to Robert Fulton for less than half of what Boydell had paid. Fulton, the American later famous for the steamboat, had come to London nearly 20 years before to study painting with Benjamin West, then turned to engineering. As he prepared to ship his pictures across the Atlantic, he asked his old teacher to retouch them, and West did so in 1806. The scene is Act 3, Scene 4 of the play. In the storm on the heath the old king, held up by the loyal Earl of Kent, flings back his head and curses the weather and his daughters. Edgar, disguised as a mad beggar, crouches half-naked at the right, and the Fool huddles at the left below Gloucester's torch. In 1807 the canvas was shown at the new Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where admirers said it exceeded anything they had ever seen. After Fulton's death the Boston Athenaeum bought it at auction in New York in 1828, for 600 dollars. Both of West's dates are still on the rock at the lower left, 1788 and Retouched 1806.