Imogen found in the cave of Belarius

The period between the years of William Hogarth (1697–1764) and George Dawe (1781–1829) were active has been called the ‘Shakespeare phenomenon’, during which the playwright triumphed over his peers as the great national writer. By the end of the 18th century, one play in every six performed in London was by William Shakespeare; he was translated into French and German, becoming little short of Germany’s national poet and bard. A more immediate visual backcloth to Dawe’s painting was John Boydell’s immensely ambitious, if somewhat ill-fated, project to showcase Shakespeare in the form of paintings by England’s leading national artists at the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in London, together with the publication of a massive, three-volume illustrated folio edition of the plays (1791–1803).

Stylistically, Dawe was poised between the ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’ of neoclassicism, evident in Imogen Found in the Cave of Belarius, and the more overtly emotional Romanticism (both in meteorological and psychological terms) of his Coleridge-influenced Genevieve (1812; Te  Papa). The scene he depicts in the 1808 painting is unfamiliar to today’s audiences, although the play in which Imogen was the heroine, Cymbeline, was popular at the time, and her character was later much loved by sentimental Victorian audiences. Daughter of Cymbeline, Imogen is the faithful, brave wife of Posthumus, who at this stage of the play (Act IV, Scene ii) is deceived into believing that Imogen has been seduced by Iachimo, and is intent on her murder at an arranged rendezvous at Milford Haven. Tipped off about Posthumus’s dastardly plans, Imogen is on the run in the nearby Welsh mountains, disguised as a pageboy, Fidele (‘Faithful’). She finds refuge in the gloomy cave of Dawe’s setting. Exhausted and sick, she has taken a potion, and is being lovingly cradled by her new friend and fellow cave-dweller Arviragus, whom she does not yet know is – in a remarkable coincidence – her long-lost brother. Looking on is her other unknown brother, Guiderius, and their guardian, the wrongfully exiled Belarius, who had stolen the boys as infants from Cymbeline in revenge, only to bond with them.

It is to Dawe’s credit that he produces a credible, readable and, once the dramatic moment is identified, even touching episode within a madly convoluted plot. Ambitiously, he has attempted to cross artistic genres from relatively lowly illustration to elevated history painting, no doubt in his bid for recognition by the Royal Academy. The extreme depth of Imogen’s slumber – briefly mistaken for death – is convincingly conveyed. At the same time, it is precisely this intense earnestness and faithfulness to the largely unfamiliar text that acts as a barrier between the painting and today’s audiences – who don’t know and perhaps don’t even care what it is about. Another, slightly modified version of the same painting on a nearidentical scale is in Tate Britain. The composition is tightened, and Guiderius looks more directly and solicitously at Imogen, as does one of the hounds. This version, which was exhibited at the British Institution in 1809, has been subjected to a full academic finish, rendered with the characteristically mellowed tonalities and glazes of painting at the time. In turn, Te Papa’s version remained in the artist’s family, passing down to Dawe’s nephew, later chief justice of New Zealand, Sir James Prendergast (1826–1921), and thence to the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts.

See: Mark Stocker, '"Look here upon this picture": Shakespeare in art at Te Papa', Tuhinga 28 (2017), pp. 31-48, esp. pp. 33-34.