About this work
- The painting was made in **1784** and is now held by the **Birmingham Museums Trust**.
- It depicts a scene from **Shakespeare's *Henry IV*, Part 1, Act 3, Scene 1**, and is said to show the actor **John Kemble** as both Hotspur and Glendower.
- In that scene, Hotspur, Worcester, Mortimer, and the Welsh rebel leader Glendower meet in Wales to finalise the terms of their plot against King Henry and determine how they will divide up the conquered kingdom.
- Hotspur ridicules Glendower to his face and is criticised by Mortimer and Worcester for doing so.
- A map is produced, and the rebel leaders proceed to divide England into three parts — the north going to the Percies, the west to Glendower, and the south to Mortimer.
- Hotspur expresses his dissatisfaction with the division, insisting that the course of the River Trent be changed so as to enlarge his share.
- During this period, the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery reflected the transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism, and Fuseli's works within it represent the newly emerging Romantic movement.
- Worcester characterises Hotspur as "too willful-blunt," saying that while his boldness occasionally lends him greatness and courage, it more often leads him into harsh rage and disdain.
Four men crowd a shadowed interior and the tension is immediate. At the composition's charged centre, Hotspur and Glendower face one another in barely contained confrontation — figures rendered with the muscular, sculptural force Fuseli absorbed from Michelangelo — while Mortimer and Worcester flank them, their postures caught between intervention and watchfulness. A map, the disputed object of the scene, anchors the lower register of the canvas, its curling edges a mundane counterpoint to the ferocious energy above. Fuseli works in a palette of deep ochres, muted reds, and dramatic darks: firelit flesh against obscure backgrounds, the whole scene seeming to be lit from within rather than from any fixed source. The faces carry the argument before a word is read.
Painted in 1784 , this work predates Fuseli's formal contributions to Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery by two years, placing it among his earliest sustained engagements with Shakespearean material. The scene depicted — Act 3, Scene 1 of *Henry IV, Part 1* — shows the rebel leaders meeting in Wales to finalise their plot against King Henry and their scheme to divide the conquered kingdom.
Hotspur openly ridicules Glendower and is critic
