One of the mandatory sights for a visitor to London at the end of the eighteenth century was Alderman Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. Housed in its own building in a popular section of the city, it contained dozens of paintings illustrating scenes from Shakespeare plays created by the most famous artists living in London at the time. For many years, the Gallery was the talk of the town.

In November 1786 Josiah Boydell, his print-publisher uncle Alderman John Boydell, and the bookseller George Nicol, along with other artists and friends, conceived of the idea for the Shakespeare Gallery. Together, they proposed to publish a new, illustrated edition of Shakespeare's plays. Careful editing, groundbreaking design, and new ink technologies would be used to make the project (what would be a nine-volume set) a reality. The illustrations were the most important part of the project. For this purpose, the project organizers would commission paintings by the most famous artists of the day and, as soon as these would be completed, the artwork would hang in a gallery called the Gallery of Shakespeare. From these paintings, two sets of engravings would be made: one would serve as the actual illustrations in the books, and a larger set would be bound together in a separate folio volume.

The press enthusiastically reported on the development of the building itself to London's public, so that when the Shakespeare Gallery opened in May 4, 1789, it was crowded with an audience eager to see it. Although the opening exhibition contained 34 pictures, by the 1805 when the collection was last exhibited as a whole, it contained 167 paintings by 33 artists. John Boydell had originally intended to give the contents of the collection to the England as a gift, but increased costs and a turbulent political environment made this generous gesture impossible. In order to pay his creditors, he held a lottery in which the building as well as the pictures went to the holder of the winning ticket. Thus, a certain Ms. Tassie became the new owner, but she was not interested in having the art collection, so she contracted the famous auction house Christie's to auction all the works off. The collection dispersed, with most paintings ending in private collections.

Because of this, the Shakespeare Gallery engravings took on a greater importance in the study of art history: not only were they a record of English printmaking, they were also the only complete record that remained of a project that showed a cross-section of English painting during the last two decades of the eighteenth century. It was also the first of its kind. By the end of the eighteenth century many other similar thematic picture galleries were being commissioned, including a Poet's Gallery, which was to include paintings of subjects from all the major British poets, in addition to Shakespeare.