Puck and the Prince of Wales

Abstract This essay looks at Harriet Hosmer’s popular statue of Puck, and its purchase by the Prince of Wales on a trip to Rome in 1859. The statue instigated the prince’s long-standing affection for the country and inaugurated his independent art collection. This essay investigates the significance for Hosmer of the Prince of Wales’s custom, and what the purchase of a Shakespeare character sculpted by a young American says about the Prince of Wales’s taste, his aesthetic ambitions, and Shakespeare’s ‘soft power’ as a cultural ambassador. The prince also bought two paintings on an Italian theme by Frederic Leighton, which were displayed alongside Puck in his student rooms. At a time when Italy was preparing to fight for independence from Austria, and when the prince’s parents, though publicly anti-interventionist, were privately pro-Austrian, the prince’s purchases bespeak his sympathy for cultural collaboration and internationalism rooted in Italy, and partially enabled by Shakespeare.