Live Auction 6574Andrew Wyld: Connoisseur Dealer
George Romney (Dalton-in-Furness 1734-1802 Kendal)
Lot 30

George Romney (Dalton-in-Furness 1734-1802 Kendal)

The Infant Shakespeare nursed by Comedy and Tragedy

Closed10 July 2012

Price Realised

GBP 5,625

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George Romney (Dalton-in-Furness 1734-1802 Kendal)
The Infant Shakespeare nursed by Comedy and Tragedy
numbered '18' (on the reverse)
pen and brown ink, fragmentary watermark, on paper
4½ x 7¼ in. (11.4 x 18.5 cm.)

Alfred de Pass (L. 2104E), by whom given to
Royal Institute of Cornwall, Truro; Christie's, London, 22 February 1966, lot 24 (part of an album of sketches and notes).
Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 18 June 1970, lot 89 (as A figure study: study for the infant Shakespeare nursed by Comedy and Tragedy). Jerrold and Jackie Ziff; Christie's, New York, 1-3 October 2007, lot 1034.

Specialist note

Romney originally conceived a composition featuring an infant attended by two women as Jupiter with two nurses: he made sketches of this image in Florence in 1775. The artist then developed the idea as the Infant Shakespeare nursed by Comedy and Tragedy, one version of which survives as a large-scale cartoon, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. The cartoon dates from 1778-80. The Shakespeare subject reappears in 1783 in the September and November sketchbooks formerly in the De Pass collection at the Royal Cornwall Institution. The present drawing was page 21 of the book dated November 1783 (photographs of all the sketchbook pages are in the Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art).

Apart from those in the 1783 sketchbooks there are a number of independent sheets of studies of the Infant Shakespeare, including three in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.