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

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.