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R. WILSON BARRETT, who is the son of a gentleman who farmed his own estate in Essex, received his education at a private school. During his school-days, at the age of thirteen, he one night spent his only sixpence in visiting the gallery of the Princess's Theatre, where Charles Kean was playing Hamlet; and he has himself described how he was therewith fired with two ambitions—to play Hamlet, and to marry Miss Heath, a charming actress who was appearing in the piece—and how he afterwards achieved both objects. His first appearance as the Prince of Denmark took place in 1884, on the very stage on which he had first seen the character performed. At twenty-two, the age of our first portrait, Mr. Wilson Barrett was studying his art in that great school for actors—the provincial stage. At the present day, as represented in our second portrait, his fine features are well known to every playgoer, as equally adapted to the picturesque melancholy of the Silver King, the classical countenance of Claudian, or the boyish and pathetic beauty of the Chatterton of seventeen.

For these portraits we are indebted to the kindness of Mr. Wilson Barrett.