Scene from ‘Twelfth Night’ (‘Malvolio and the Countess’)

This 1840 scene from Twelfth Night depicting Malvolio and the Countess Olivia is one of Maclise's finest Shakespearean compositions, now at the National Gallery London. The comedy of Malvolio's deluded courtship — convinced by a forged letter that Olivia loves him, he appears in yellow stockings and crossed garters to her bewilderment — provided Maclise with a perfect subject: the collision between social pretension and reality played out through costume, facial expression, and theatrical misunderstanding. Victorian audiences who knew their Shakespeare well could decode every element of the scene's irony. The painting demonstrates Maclise's ability to render both comedy and pathos simultaneously through his mastery of expressive physiognomy.

The comic contrast between Malvolio's preening self-regard and the Countess's bemusement is conveyed through precisely observed facial expressions and gestures, set within an Elizabethan interior reconstructed with Maclise's typical archaeological accuracy.