Lot Essay
The picture illustrates Act IV, Scene 1, of Shakespeare's tragedy, and shows Macbeth seeking the 'weird sisters' to know what the future holds following the appearance of Banquo's ghost. He finds them preparing their charms:
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blindworm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Chadwick is an obscure figure whose paintings seldom appear on the market. Working at a series of addresses in London, he exhibited at the Royal Academy and Suffolk Street, showing mainly subject pictures and portraits. Architectural pieces and seascapes are also, however, recorded.
In the present picture he seems to be consciously looking back to an earlier period, when the subject - either the scene shown here or the earlier episode of Macbeth and Banquo encountering the witches in Act 1, Scene 3 - had enjoyed an international vogue. Francesco Zuccarelli, Alexander Runciman, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Henry Fuseli, George Romney, John Martin, Joseph Anton Koch, J.B.C. Corot and Théodore Chassériau were among those who attempted it between the 1760s and the 1850s. The closest parallel is Reynolds's contribution to the Boydell Shakespeare, which not only treats the same scene as Chadwick's picture but adopts a comparably dramatic scheme of lighting, said to have been inspired in Reynolds's case by Titian's Martyrdon of St Sebastian in the Gesuiti in Venice.
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blindworm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Chadwick is an obscure figure whose paintings seldom appear on the market. Working at a series of addresses in London, he exhibited at the Royal Academy and Suffolk Street, showing mainly subject pictures and portraits. Architectural pieces and seascapes are also, however, recorded.
In the present picture he seems to be consciously looking back to an earlier period, when the subject - either the scene shown here or the earlier episode of Macbeth and Banquo encountering the witches in Act 1, Scene 3 - had enjoyed an international vogue. Francesco Zuccarelli, Alexander Runciman, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Henry Fuseli, George Romney, John Martin, Joseph Anton Koch, J.B.C. Corot and Théodore Chassériau were among those who attempted it between the 1760s and the 1850s. The closest parallel is Reynolds's contribution to the Boydell Shakespeare, which not only treats the same scene as Chadwick's picture but adopts a comparably dramatic scheme of lighting, said to have been inspired in Reynolds's case by Titian's Martyrdon of St Sebastian in the Gesuiti in Venice.