A Shared Passion: Henry Clay Folger, Jr. and Emily Jordan Folger as Collectors

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A Shared Passion: Henry Clay Folger, Jr. and Emily Jordan Folger as Collectors was part of the Exhibitions at the Folger. Major support for this exhibition came from The Winton and Carolyn Blount Exhibition Fund.

Henry Clay Folger, Jr. (1857-1930) and Emily Jordan Folger (1858-1936), throughout their married life worked together to build the collection that became the foundation of the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Folgers took as their purview all things Shakespearean—the books, pamphlets, documents, and manuscripts for which they are best known and that constituted the principal part of their acquisitions, and also pictures and art objects. Their shared passion for collecting fulfilled the Folgers' need for a larger purpose in life. Inevitably, their vision of the collection evolved into that of an institution dedicated to the benefit of scholarly investigators and the nation.

A Shared Passion shows this pair of collectors, otherwise known only as extremely private personages, as they actually functioned, exercising the taste that guided them and employing the techniques at their command. Here, through their relations with dealers grand and modest and with other collectors antecedent and contemporary, and by their purchases large and small, magnificent and moderate, the Folgers emerge as sympathetic and admirable personalities.

Exhibition material

Rare Books

The Shakespeare Folios

The Titus Andronicus Quarto

Paintings and Art Objects

Fuseli's Macbeth Painting

Writing of Mr. Folger as a collector, Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach pointed out that "not content with the literary side, Mr. Folger interested himself also in the artistic" — in paintings and in objects, of artistic, sentimental, and associative value.

Among the five paintings featured in A Shared Passion is Henry Fuseli's dreamlike 1793 painting, Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head. This painting is one of the finest examples in the Folgers' collection of the literary illustrations of Shakespeare, a vision of a passage in his writings by an artist, which never could be performed on the stage.

The well-read Swiss painter Henry Fuseli, who worked in London, elevates this scene in Macbeth — his favorite Shakespeare play — to the level of the fantastical. Fuseli considered the picture one of his "best poetical conceptions," and critics have named it his greatest artistic achievement.

The painting passed into the London art trade at the auction of actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's collection in September 1921, eventually reaching Mr. Folger in December 1922 via the London bookseller Maggs.


Thomas Parr's Hamlet Figurine

Thomas Nast's Immortal Light

Little known now except as a political cartoonist, Thomas Nast was a well-trained artist who also painted in oil, and he was a thorough devotee of Shakespeare. Henry Irving, the English actor, commissioned a painting, now lost, for which this one is a study.

The figures of Tragedy, kneeling, and Comedy, standing in armor, sword in hand, are depicted in the room where Shakespeare was born. They offer laurel wreaths to his dramatically lit image, based on the bust of Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon.A version of the Stratford bust is centered on the wall of the Folger Old Reading Room.

Mr. Folger bought The Immortal Light of Genius in 1908 at a sale in New York of Nast's effects.

The Folgers as Collectors

Dealers and Dealing

The Influence of Emerson

Mrs. Folger's Role

Building an Institution