Cleveland Museum of Art

Queen Mab's Cave

Joseph Mallord William Turner

Date

after 1846

Medium

oil on fabric

Culture

England, 19th century

Department

Modern European Painting and Sculpture

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

This work is a reduced copy of a painting first exhibited by Turner at the British Institution in 1846 that passed, with the rest of his immense bequest to the nation, into the collections of the National Gallery and finally, in 1954, the Tate Gallery. Several lines from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Turner's manuscript poem "Fallacies of Hope" were appended to the title in the British Institution catalogue, but they did little to explicate the nearly unintelligible concoction of fairies and Welsh ruins that make up this composition. Copies of Queen Mab's Cave by anonymous artists are abundant. Queen Mab is a miniature fairy from English folklore who inspires dreams and plays pranks on people during the night. Shakespeare refers to her in both Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream ,

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