The Salvage Man

William Kent showed an interest in book-illustration from his earliest days in London after his return from Rome in 1719 and worked on designs for frontispiece, head- and tale-pieces for various publications. This particular drawing was one out of thirty-two designs created by Kent for Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and was published by Stephen Wright and John Brindley in their edition of 1751.

Due to disparity in the allocation of the subjects between the volumes, it was once believed that a series of drawings for The Faerie Queene project was unfinished by Kent before his death. This theory was brought into doubt, however, by the fact that the existing drawings are numbered sequentially in ink, apparently by Kent himself, which indicates that no more than the thirty-two published were intended.