Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet, painted in 1884 and held by Southampton City Art Gallery, is one of Frank Dicksee's most celebrated Shakespeare subjects, depicting the balcony scene from Act II of the play with the full romantic intensity that made his reputation as a painter of literary subjects. Victorian painters turned to Shakespeare obsessively — his plays provided narratively rich, culturally prestigious, and emotionally accessible subjects that could be treated with elaborate pictorial skill. Dicksee's Romeo and Juliet captures the most famous romantic moment in European dramatic literature: the declaration of love, the night setting, the spatial separation between the lovers that both signals their social impossibility and charges their encounter with desperate longing. Southampton City Art Gallery's collection reflects the tastes of a prosperous Victorian port city that invested in Royal Academy painting as a mark of civic culture. Dicksee's painting is one of the gallery's signature works.

Oil on canvas on a large, ambitious scale. The night setting creates dramatic opportunities for the handling of light — torchlight or moonlight playing on costumes and architectural surfaces. Dicksee exploits the warm-cool contrast between artificial and natural light sources with considerable