I recently saw (and very much enjoyed) The Romance of the Middle Ages at the Bodleian:
The Romance of the Middle Ages
Quite a few beautiful manuscripts and fascinating rare books from Douce’s collection have been included in this exhibition but, being Spanish, my favourite knight in armour had to be ‘the valorous and witty-knight errant’ Don Quijote de la Mancha. Douce’s Sir Billy of Billerecay, or the Essex Don Quixote, is on display and this is just one of many versions, translations, and editions of Cervantes’s work he owned. Interestingly, the 1819 Spanish edition published under the auspices of the Real Academia is among them -Douce thus acquired the most up-to-date Don Quijote in its original language, although this might have been because of the plates, which had been commissioned to Spain’s best engravers.
Douce’s interest in both romances and parody explains his fascination with Don Quixote, which, of course, was not unusual in the eighteenth-century, when many translations and illustrated editions were published. An instance of this popularity are the series of plates by Daniel Chodowiecki, to which the fight against the sheep below pertains:
Daniel Chodowiecki, Don Quixote fighting the sheep, 1770, etching, Bequeathed by Francis Douce, 1834 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).
Douce also owned a drawing by John Vanderbanck that, as D. B. Brown explains in his catalogue, was a ‘preliminary design for the third of Vanderbanck’s sixty-eight illustrations for Lord Carteret’s Spanish edition’ of the novel (cat. no. 1834), published in 1738:
John Vanderbanck, Don Quixote outside the Inn, 1726, pen and brown ink over indications in graphite (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).