"Narrative painting" describes pictures that tell a story or illustrate an incident. For example, paintings like Holman Hunt's Measure for Measure, which depicts the meeting between Ferdinand and his sister Isabella in prison, invite the viewer to supply the narrative that is implicit and to "interpret" the picture's psychological, moral, or didactic import. Some narrative painting is described as Òanecdotal art," where the viewer's interest arises from the subject of the picture. These pictures where especially liked by the Victorians and often are moral or didactic lessons in oil. See, for an example, Holman Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd, one of the masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
"Literary art," as its name implies, is derived from plays, poems, or novels. Most of the paintings in Shakespeare Illustrated fall under this category. Sometimes the relationship between painting and text was so slight as to be nonexistent. Paintings with no obvious literary association was often accompanied by a few lines or a brief quotation on the frame or in the exhibition catalog. Richard Altick devotes an entire chapter (180-95) to this phenomenon in painting, where he discusses the "modern instance," when a contemporary scene was accompanied by a literary source that seemed somehow analogous. These allusions served, in a way, like epigraphs to poems, short stories, essays, and the chapters of novels. For an example of a literary painting of this sort, see Daniel Maclise's Winter Night's Tale, in which an old woman tells a story to her rapt family gathered around the fireplace. Accompanying the painting are these lines from Richard II: "In winter's tedious night, sit by the fire / With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales / Of woeful ages long ago betid" (V. i. 40-42). That is the only link between painting and play.
"Genre painting" was a category established on the Continent (particularly in the Lowlands) in the seventeenth century and then popularized in England in the nineteenth century in realistic paintings of real rural life and the working-class poor of the cities. Julian Treuherz discusses these paintings in Hard Times: Social Realism in Victorian Art (1987). Genre paintings, like literary paintings, were sometimes accompanied by an apt literary quotation.
As the middle-class market for paintings, engravings and cheap reproductions for the parlor wall expanded, artists began to specialize in subjects and the sub-genres haphazardly proliferate. Artists would work almost exclusively in one area: animals, children, shipwrecks, rural landscapes, and the like. Two of the these categories appear among the paintings we shall consider: "fairy paintings" and "keepsake beauties." Some artists, like Sir William Noel Paton, turned out impressive canvasses peopled with fairies and elves from A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, and Romeo and Juliet (Mercutio's Queen Mab). Keepsakes were paintings of beautiful women, and hundreds of Ophelias, Celias, Juliets, Mirandas and Portias were churned out--as well as paintings and prints of beautiful actresses playing these heroines from Shakespeare's plays. Eventually, these illustrations were gathered, reproduced and published in various albums, annuals, portfolios, and even as postcards.