'The Merry Wives of Windsor', Act I, Scene 1, Anne Page and Slender

The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act I Scene 1 from 1834 by Augustus Wall Callcott is one of his Shakespearean literary landscapes. The play's celebration of middle-class English life in a small country town aligned perfectly with Callcott's landscape aesthetic, which valued the familiar, domestic beauty of the English countryside over the sublime or exotic. Literary landscapes occupied an important place in early Victorian painting, giving landscape subjects the additional prestige of Shakespearean narrative. As one of the most respected landscape painters in early Victorian England, Callcott brought careful technique and a pleasing balance of observation and idealization to his subjects. The Royal Shakespeare Theatre holds this work in the appropriately theatrical institutional context of the world's leading Shakespeare organization.

The literary figures are set within an idealized English landscape, combining theatrical narrative with Callcott's atmospheric pastoral painting.