Henry Wallis - Chatterton - Google Art Project

''The Death of Chatterton'' is an

oil painting Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of ...

on canvas, by the English

Pre-Raphaelite The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James ...

painter

Henry Wallis Henry Wallis (21 February 1830 – 20 December 1916) was a British Pre-Raphaelite painter, writer and collector. Wallis was born in London on 21 February 1830, but his father's name and occupation are unknown. When in 1845 his mother, Mary ...

(1830 - 1916), now in

Tate Britain Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in ...

, London. Two smaller versions, sketches or replicas, are possessed by the

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BM&AG) is a museum and art gallery in Birmingham, England. It has a collection of international importance covering fine art, ceramics, metalwork, jewellery, natural history, archaeology, ethnography, local ...

and the

Yale Center for British Art Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the worl ...

. The Tate painting measures by , and was completed during 1856.

The painting

The subject of the painting was the 17-year-old English early Romantic poet

Thomas Chatterton Thomas Chatterton (20 November 1752 – 24 August 1770) was an English poet whose precocious talents ended in suicide at age 17. He was an influence on Romantic artists of the period such as Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Althoug ...

(1752..1770), shown dead after he had poisoned himself with

arsenic Arsenic is a chemical element with the symbol As and atomic number 33. Arsenic occurs in many minerals, usually in combination with sulfur and metals, but also as a pure elemental crystal. Arsenic is a metalloid. It has various allotropes, but ...

in 1770. Chatterton was considered a

Romantic hero The Romantic hero is a literary archetype referring to a character that rejects established norms and conventions, has been rejected by society, and has themselves at the center of their own existence. The Romantic hero is often the protagonist in ...

for many young and struggling artists in Wallis's time. Wallis's ''Chatterton'' reveals his association with the Pre-Raphaelite style, seen in the vibrant colours and careful build-up of symbolic detail. He used a bold colour scheme with a contrasting palette and he exploited the fall of the natural light through the window of the garret to implement his much loved style at the time,

chiaroscuro Chiaroscuro ( , ; ), in art, is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition. It is also a technical term used by artists and art historians for the use of contrasts of light to achi ...

. Wallis painted the work in a friend's chamber in

Gray's Inn The Honourable Society of Gray's Inn, commonly known as Gray's Inn, is one of the four Inns of Court (professional associations for barristers and judges) in London. To be called to the bar in order to practise as a barrister in England and Wale ...

, with

St Paul's Cathedral St Paul's Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in London and is the seat of the Bishop of London. The cathedral serves as the mother church of the Diocese of London. It is on Ludgate Hill at the highest point of the City of London and is a Grad ...

on the skyline visible through the window. It was probably a coincidence that this location was close to the garret in Brooke Street where Chatterton died 86 years before. The model used for the painting was the young

George Meredith George Meredith (12 February 1828 – 18 May 1909) was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. At first his focus was poetry, influenced by John Keats among others, but he gradually established a reputation as a novelist. ''The Ord ...

, a 19th century English novelist and poet. The painting was Wallis's first exhibited work. It was shown at the

Royal Academy summer exhibition The Summer Exhibition is an open art exhibition held annually by the Royal Academy in Burlington House, Piccadilly in central London, England, during the months of June, July, and August. The exhibition includes paintings, prints, drawings, sc ...

in 1856, with a quotation from the ''

Tragedy of Doctor Faustus ''The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus'', commonly referred to simply as ''Doctor Faustus'', is an Elizabethan tragedy by Christopher Marlowe, based on German stories about the title character Faust. It was probably writ ...

'' by

Christopher Marlowe Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe (; baptised 26 February 156430 May 1593), was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe is among the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights. Based upon the ...

inscribed on the frame: "Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burned is Apollo's laurel bough". It was an immediate success, with

John Ruskin John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and politi ...

describing it as "faultless and wonderful". It drew large crowds at the

Art Treasures Exhibition The Art Treasures of Great Britain was an exhibition of fine art held in Manchester, England, from 5 May to 17 October 1857.''Rebels And Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century''

Alexander Sturgis Alexander John Sturgis (born 6 November 1963) is a British art historian and museum curator. He is the current Museum director, Director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. He was Museum director, Director of the Holburne Museum in Bath, Somerse ...

, p. 52 and was one of the most popular paintings of the 18th century in reproductive print form. Wallis sold the painting to

Augustus Egg Augustus Leopold Egg RA (2 May 1816, in London – 26 March 1863, in Algiers) was a British Victorian artist, and member of The Clique best known for his modern triptych '' Past and Present'' (1858), which depicts the breakup of a middle-class ...

in 1856, and Egg sold the right to make engraved reproductions. The painting became the subject of a court case after Dublin photographer James Robinson was inspired to recreate the painting as a

tableau vivant A (; often shortened to ; plural: ), French language, French for "living picture", is a static scene containing one or more actors or models. They are stationary and silent, usually in costume, carefully posed, with props and/or scenery, and ...

so he could sell photographs of the scene. The painting was left to the

Tate Gallery Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...

Charles Gent Clement Charles is a masculine given name predominantly found in English and French speaking countries. It is from the French form ''Charles'' of the Proto-Germanic name (in runic alphabet) or ''*karilaz'' (in Latin alphabet), whose meaning was "f ...

in 1899. There are two smaller versions of the same subject by Wallis, one either a study or a replica in the

, which measures by and, somewhat unusually for the period, a small oil-on-panel replica at the

, which measures by .Yale page
/ref> The Birmingham work was sold at

Christie's Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie (auctioneer), James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, at Rockefeller Center in New York City and at Alexandra House in Hong Kong. It is ...

in 1875 to Baron Albert Grant and then in 1877 to William Kendrick, who donated it to the gallery in 1918.

Inspirations

The main singer of the group Feu! Chatterton said that he was inspired by this painting for the name of the group.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Death of Chatterton, The 1856 paintings Paintings by Henry Wallis Collection of the Tate galleries Collections of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Paintings in the Yale Center for British Art Pre-Raphaelite paintings Paintings about suicide