In his remark that 'Nothing, perhaps, can more completely demonstrate the total ignorance of the public of all that is great or valuable in Shakspeare (sic) than their universal admiration of Maclise's Hamlet', Ruskin refers to Daniel Maclise's portrait of Hamlet, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1842. Appropriately, the critics who were most scornful of Turner lavished the greatest praise on Maclise's portrait (see the Atheneum, no. 758, p. 409; the Literary Gazette, no. 1320, p. 316; Blackwood's Magazine, July 1842, p. 28). ( Works, 3.82n.)
Ruskin appended his own unfavourable remarks on Maclise's 'Hamlet' as a footnote included in the first and second editions of Modern Painters. ( Works, 3.619n). He entertained a similarly poor opinion of Maclise's 'Macbeth,' exhibited at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857, where Ruskin delivered two lectures on the political economy of art (see "Charles Kean's King Richard II: A Pre-Raphaelite Drama" by Richard Foulkes, in Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage, edited by Richard Foulkes, 1986, pp. 39-55.)