Rosalind and Celia

This depiction of Rosalind and Celia from As You Like It reflects Maclise's sustained engagement with Shakespearean subjects throughout his career. The two friends — Rosalind and Celia plotting their escape from the usurping duke's court — offered Maclise the opportunity to depict a scene of female friendship, loyalty, and conspiratorial excitement that was well suited to his abilities as a painter of expressive faces and animated conversation. Victorian painters found in Shakespeare's comedies a repertoire of subjects combining romance, humor, and moral sentiment that engaged the middle-class exhibition audiences who formed the primary market for Victorian genre and literary painting.

The two female figures are composed with Maclise's characteristic attention to gesture and expression, their contrasting personalities conveyed through pose and costume in a carefully balanced pictorial arrangement.