The Death of Chatterton

'The Death of Chatterton' of 1856, now at the National Gallery (though Tate holds the primary institutional association with this work as one of its canonical Pre-Raphaelite holdings), is the painting that established Henry Wallis's reputation almost overnight. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856, the work provoked an immediate and sustained public response, becoming one of the most discussed paintings of its generation. Thomas Chatterton, the Bristol poet who died by arsenic poisoning at seventeen in 1770 in a London garret, embodied the Romantic myth of the misunderstood genius destroyed by a philistine society, and the subject resonated intensely with Victorian artists and audiences. The model for Chatterton was almost certainly the novelist George Meredith, whose red hair is visible in the figure, and the relationship between Wallis and Meredith deepened into an affair with Meredith's wife that ended the friendship. Pre-Raphaelite critics including Ruskin praised the work's colour truth and the quality of its dawn light entering through the garret window.

Wallis achieved the luminous dawn light by which the painting is partly distinguished through careful work with a warm-toned ground glazed with cool grey-blue overpainting, creating the effect of early light filtering through a London rooftop window. The figure's pose on the narrow bed required compositional management to distribute the visual interest without making the death look comfortable or composed.