Escena de La tempestad de Shakespeare

In the 1730s you could not see Shakespeare's Tempest played straight on a London stage. What the theatres staged was a rewritten operatic version, decades old, thick with extra songs and spirits. Hogarth went back to the original text instead and painted this scene from it: the shipwrecked prince Ferdinand kneeling before Miranda, her father the magician Prospero behind them, the spirit Ariel in the air and the creature Caliban hauling wood off to the side. He dressed them in the rich manner of Van Dyck and Rembrandt, the Old Masters an ambitious English painter was expected to measure himself against. That was rather the point. Hogarth wanted to show that British artists could carry serious subjects, and few subjects were more British than the national poet. It is among the earliest oil paintings ever taken from a Shakespeare play.