Sunday, August 10, 2003

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic

LONDON -- Seldom are a gallery and exhibit better matched. Now a comfortable suburb south of London, Dulwich was once a country town where Dulwich College was founded in 1619 by actor-manager Edward Alleyn (1566-1626) -- the same Ned Alleyn who was the leading tragic actor in London when Shakespeare started and who first played the great Marlowe roles and Shakespeare's early history plays. He was probably also the example Hamlet had in mind when describing how not to overact.

	About the exhibit Previously seen only in Ferrara, Italy, the exhibit continues at Dulwich through Oct. 19. From London, take a commuter train from London Bridge (to North Dulwich) or from Victoria (to West Dulwich). For information, call 011-44-20-8693-5254 or visit www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk.

Enriched by theater, just as Shakespeare was, Alleyn left an institution intended to shelter the old and educate the young. Over two centuries, Dulwich College sank into somnolence, but it did own some 100 old-master paintings left by Alleyn and actor/bookseller William Cartwright (1606-86). Then, in 1810, it was bequeathed some 350 more paintings, gathered by collector/dealer Noel Desenfans and artist/collector Francis Bourgeois -- many originally intended for the king of Poland -- along with an endowment and a fund to build a new gallery.

The resulting Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1811, designed by Sir John Soane (he of the Bank of England and his own idiosyncratic museum), is now England's oldest public art gallery and claims to be one of the most influential examples of gallery design in the world.

Its permanent collection is richest in Dutch, Flemish and French -- Van Dyck (13), Rubens (20), Teniers (22), Cuyp (18) and Poussin (7), but also Guido Reni, Tiepolo, Murillo, Rembrandt, Hogarth and Gainsborough. Included also are portraits of Alleyn and of Richard Burbage (c. 1568-1619), Shakespeare's theater partner and the world's first Hamlet, Lear, Richard III and Othello.

This Shakespeare connection finally enticed me to Dulwich for the first time to see the current special exhibit, "Shakespeare in Art," containing 88 choice paintings and drawings dated 1730-1860. This is the period during which Shakespeare was raised from a popular if old-fashioned English playwright to the supreme example of European playwright/poet. In the process of portraying Shakespeare's characters, stories and themes, artists also exemplify the progress from classical to romantic and beyond.

You can see the myth-making at its fullest in Henry Wallis' 1857 "A Sculptor's Workshop, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1617," a fanciful tribute in which Ben Jonson holds Shakespeare's death mask, while Holy Trinity Church (Shakespeare's burial spot) gleams in the distance and children play with toy animals, representing Shakespeare's own rural youth.

Representing the imaginative sway of Shakespeare's creations are the Swiss Henry Fuseli's "The Weird Sisters" (1783) from "Macbeth" and the Irish James Barry's "King Lear Mourns the Death of Cordelia" (1774). Fuseli is the star of the exhibit, with seven paintings, each stranger and more probing in its fevered psychology, none more than his "Titania Embracing Bottom" (1792-93), which turns Titania's attendant fairies into genteel dominatrixes.

There are seven William Blakes, none more magical than his two angels and Pegasus illustrating a description of Hal in "1 Henry IV." Joshua Reynolds is represented by a marvelously unnerving Puck. There are contributions by William Hogarth (including "Falstaff Examining His Troops") I've never seen, since they're in private hands, as well as multiple paintings by Delacroix, Millais, Romney, Moreau and Hayman, to name a few. The Grieve Family of scenic artists provides a dozen colorful, detailed mid-19th-century designs for sets, properties and costumes.

Millais' "Ferdinand Lured by Ariel" (1849-50) is one favorite among many. The interest of these paintings includes changing artistic styles and Shakespearean subject matter, providing eccentric insight into the plays, as well as the development of acting, which keeps inventing new realisms, and the history of Shakespearean staging and decoration.

These many subjects are tackled copiously in the thorough 256-page hardbound exhibit catalog by Jane Martineau et al., "Shakespeare in Art" (London and N.Y.: Merrell Publishers, 2003; U.K. 29.95, U.S. $49.95). Along with large color reproductions and discussion of the 88 items in the exhibit, it includes 11 essays on such subjects as the development of Bardolatry, "Shakespeare and the Sublime," "Shakespeare and Music" and "The Shakespeare Galleries of John Boydell and James Woodmason."

This latter has a Pittsburgh connection. Boydell's gallery, a 1789 commercial venture, occasioned a 1790 Francis Wheatley painting of notables in attendance. Included by Wheatley is what looks like the same Matthew William Peters painting of "Much Ado About Nothing" that now hangs in the Carnegie Museum's Panopticon "art spectacular" (which ends next Sunday).

More than 60 other images, not included in the exhibit, are also reproduced in the book, which is for those who don't make it to Dulwich -- or even more for those who do.

E-mail this story   Print this story