THE TAMING OF THE SHREW,Shakespeare,1878 Antique Print
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
FROM AN ORIGINAL PAINTING BY C.R. LESLIE R.A.
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OVERALL SIZE OF PRINT INCLUDING BORDERS: 10 3/7 x 7 1/2
SCAN ABOVE MINIMIZED TO FIT BROWSER

CONDITION: There is staining on the bottom of the left side , but it doesn't go into the plate at all. Clear and sharp with beautiful detail. As scanned. Blank on the back. Heavier paper.
Charles Robert Leslie (1794-1859), English
genre painter, was born in London on 19 October 1794. His parents were
American, and when he was five years of age he returned with them to
their native country. They settled in Philadelphia, where their son
was educated and afterwards apprenticed to a bookseller. He was, however,
mainly interested in painting and the drama, and when George Frederick
Cooke visited the city he executed a portrait of the actor from recollection
of him on the stage, which was considered a work of such promise that
a fund was raised to enable the young artist to study in Europe. He
left for London in 1811, bearing introductions which procured for him
the friendship of West, Beechey, Allston, Coleridge and Washington Irving,
and was admitted as a student of the Royal Academy, where he carried
off two silver medals. At first, influenced by West and Fuseli, he essayed
high art, and his earliest important subject depicted Saul and the Witch
of Endor; but he soon discovered his true aptitude and became a painter
of cabinet-pictures, dealing, not like those of Wilkie, with the contemporary
life that surrounded him, but with scenes from the great masters of
fiction, from Shakespeare and Cervantes, Addison and Moliere, Swift,
Sterne, Fielding and Smollett. Of individual paintings we may specify
Sir Roger de Coverley going to Church (1819); May-day in the Time of
Queen Elizabeth (1821); Sancho Panza and the Duchess (1824); Uncle Toby
and the Widow Wadman (1831); La Malade Imaginaire, act iii. sc. 6 (1843);
and the Dukes Chaplain Enraged leaving the Table, from Don Quixote (1849).
Many of his more important subjects exist in varying replicas. He possessed
a sympathetic imagination, which enabled him to enter freely into the
spirit of the author whom he illustrated, a delicate perception for
female beauty, an unfailing eye for character and its outward manifestation
in face and figure, and a genial and sunny sense of humour, guided by
an instinctive refinement which prevented it from overstepping the bounds
of good taste. In 1821 Leslie was elected A.R.A., and five years later
full academician. In 1833 he left for America to become teacher of drawing
in the military academy at West Point, but the post proved an irksome
one, and in some six months he returned to England. He died on the 5th
of May 1859. In addition to his skill as an artist, Leslie was a ready
and pleasant writer. His Life of his friend Constable, the landscape
painter, appeared in 1843, and his Handbook for Young Painters, a volume
embodying the substance of his lectures as professor of painting to
the Royal Academy, in 1855. In 1860 Tom Taylor edited his Autobiography
and Letters, which contain interesting reminiscences of his distinguished
friends and contemporaries.
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