An Incantation

Discussion

FROM THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO’S CATALOG

The Romantic painter John Hamilton Mortimer etched a series of Shakespearean heads in the mode of Thomas Frye’s Life-Sized Heads . However, this encounter between a powerful, aged sorceress and a terrified maiden has no literary source. Mortimer invented it himself, possibly responding to a critic’s assertion that Shakespeare was the only English genius who could successfully depict the preternatural realm. Dixon published another theatrical mezzotint that same year, Mr. Garrick in Richard III .

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