The Death of Mercutio – Act III, Scene I, Romeo and Juliet 1902

Edwin Austin Abbey captured this moment from Romeo and Juliet in oils, and it feels like theatre itself. The paint handling is quite dry, a very matte surface. In fact, it looks like you could run your hand across the surface without smudging any paint. There's a lot of texture – the artist hasn’t been too precious about hiding his process. He’s really letting the materiality of the paint speak. Look at the stripey building behind the figures: that’s a lot of dragging the brush across the canvas, and the paint is fairly thin in places, and very opaque elsewhere. The red of Mercutio’s clothes feels really important. It is a very different red from the one on the building, it’s much more alive, a more urgent gesture in the painting, linking violence and emotion. Abbey’s work is strongly illustrative, but also brings to mind the work of pre-Raphaelite painters like Millais in its dramatic use of light and shade. With this work, like them, he's turning a story into a space of contemplation.