Titânia e Bottom

Around 1790 the London engraver and publisher John Boydell was pouring money into a grand scheme, a whole gallery of paintings from Shakespeare, to prove that Britain could produce great history painting and to sell the prints made after them. Henry Fuseli, a Swiss-born painter with a taste for dreams and nightmares, gave him this. It is the moment from A Midsummer Night's Dream when the fairy queen Titania, put under a spell, wakes to adore Bottom, a weaver whose head has been turned into that of a donkey. Around them Fuseli packs a swarming, weightless crowd of tiny fairies and odd figures, more unsettling than sweet. Boydell's venture eventually collapsed and its pictures were sold off by lottery. This one reached the Tate in 1887, left by a collector's sister.