This terracotta of Irving as Hamlet and belongs to a creative process that began in the 1870s and concluded in 1884, and must be understood in the context of all Ford’s sculptures of Irving. At his first meeting the sculptor showed Irving a ‘rough clay model of a seated figure […]. “I have been several times in the front row of the stalls watching as closely as I could. One cannot well model clay in the stalls of a theatre. But I did this after the first time, and I have had it with me on each other occasion.”’ Impressed, Irving agreed to sit to Ford as a seated Hamlet; and he acquired the resultant bronze statuette. Also in 1880, Ford presented the Lyceum’s business manager, Bram Stoker, with a little clay bust of Irving, in this case peering from under a cap, his shoulders swathed in a cloak; in 1881 he sent Irving twenty copies of this bust (ours is one of these). Rather than as Hamlet, it has been suggested Irving might here be in the role of Vanderdecken, a poetic drama by Percy Fitzgerald about the phantom sea captain known as the Flying Dutchman, which Irving staged at the Lyceum in 1878.