This exceptional canvas is perhaps the boldest and most remarkable history painting made by George Romney in the final decades of his career. Recently used as the cover of the Romney Catalogue Raisonné, this ambitious work depicts Act II, scene II from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Romney shows Titania, Queen of the fairies, being sung to sleep by a group of her attendants. The crepuscular landscape is illuminated by other-worldly light, resembling the aurora borealis and populated by ‘the clamorous owl’, ‘spotted snakes’ and other creatures and insects mentioned in Shakespeare’s text. The painting is notable as a large-scale realisation of one of Romney’s boldest designs. A restless and relentless draughtsman, Romney frequently made hundreds of drawings refining a single composition, rarely did these drawings materialise on canvas. This makes the present picture not only an exceptional work in Romney’s oeuvre, but in its breadth of handling and bold design one of the most remarkable history paintings produced in Europe in the late eighteenth century.

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