Queen Katherine's Dream - William Blake (c. 1825)

Queen Katherine

Pen and ink with watercolor heightened with white and gold over graphite

National Gallery of Art

Queen Katherine's Dream (c. 1825) is a work in pen and ink with watercolor heightened with white and gold over graphite, depicting the visionary scene from Act IV, Scene ii of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, in which the gravely ill Queen Katherine falls into a sleep and beholds six radiant personages clad in white robes bearing garlands. William Blake (1757–1827), an English poet, painter, and printmaker regarded as a central figure of the Romantic Age, returned to this Shakespearean subject multiple times across his career, with the circa 1825 version being among his most fully realized treatments. The composition exemplifies Blake's characteristic fusion of literary source material with his personal visionary aesthetic, rendered in luminous, ethereal tones that evoke the boundary between the earthly and the divine. Held in the Rosenwald Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the work has been exhibited in major surveys of British Romantic art and stands as a significant example of Blake's late watercolor practice.