This delicate relief, exhibited here for the first time since its appearance at the Royal Academy in 1849, represents the reported scene in Shakespeare’s Richard II in which the Earl of Bolingbroke, the future King Henry IV, returns in triumph from exile. Papworth’s relief is an evocation of the offstage action. In later productions this scene began to be staged as depicted in the Princess Royal’s watercolour, no. 387.

Recorded at Kensington Palace in the late nineteenth century

No. 84