Death of Chatterton

Henry Wallis's 1861 variant of the Chatterton subject is a second treatment of the material that made his reputation with the 1856 painting exhibited at the Royal Academy to extraordinary success. The earlier version, with its model almost certainly the novelist George Meredith, became immediately iconic; this 1861 canvas, now at Bristol City Museum, offers a related composition with a different treatment of light and setting. Thomas Chatterton, the eighteenth-century Bristol-born poet who died by suicide at seventeen, was the Romantic period's paradigmatic image of the misunderstood artist destroyed by poverty and neglect, and his story had immense resonance for Victorian artists who identified with the cultural outsider. The Bristol location is particularly fitting: Chatterton was born and educated in Bristol, and the city's attachment to his memory made its museum a natural destination for this canvas.

The 1861 version demonstrates Wallis's continued engagement with the intense colour and meticulous surface finish of Pre-Raphaelite technique, though comparison with the 1856 masterwork reveals an adjusted lighting scheme and modifications in the arrangement of the figure's clothing and the garret setting. The dying light through the window is handled with the Pre-Raphaelite attention to the quality of natural illumination falling on a complex surface.