The artist's daughter Hilda Orchardson Gray wrote her father's biography The Life of Sir William Quiller Orchardson (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1930) and prefaces it with a list of his works. Later in his career he tended to prefer portraits and indoor subjects (drawing rooms, period furniture, young couples courting, etc.), but he painted at least ten pictures drawn from the plays of Shakespeare: Claudio and Isabella (Measure for Measure, Act II, Scene I) (1856), Hamlet and Ophelia (1854), Talbot and the Countess of Auvergne (1867), Christopher Sly (1867), Prince Henry, Poins and Falstaff (1868), The Duke's Antechamber (1869), Hamlet and the King (1874), Ophelia (1874), Jessica (1877), and "If Music be the Food of Love, Play On" (1890). The last painting is a modern setting with a gentleman listening to a woman at the piano and only the line from Twelfth Night makes it relevant to Shakespeare.