Perhaps the question for this month’s mystery is less about crocodiles and more about elephants:
It’s been a while since we’ve done a mystery along these lines, so enjoy letting your imagination run free: What is this and what’s it doing in the collections of the Folger Shakespeare Library?
As always, leave your comments, questions, and brainstorming below and come back next week for the reveal!
Update (November 4, 2014): All is revealed in “Dalí as you like him“!
It’s a design set by Salvador Dali for As You Like It. Since the Folger has recently acquired designs for Romeo and Juliet by him, he must be flavour of the month
What a wonderfully imaginative creature, a sort of cross between daddy-long-legs and an elephant, and such a rich background! This must have been a stunning production.
That instantly reminded me of Slavador Dali’s “Temptation of St Anthony” I first saw during my art school days.
http://www.wikiart.org/en/salvador-dali/the-temptation-of-st-anthony
It is indeed an image from the set and costume designs Salvador Dalí did for As You Like It in 1948—so very close in period to “The Temptation of St Anthony.” I love the exaggerated quality of this and thinking about what sort of AYLI it might create. More soon on the production, but in the meantime, you can peruse some costume designs: http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/2c280g