Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1981.25.648
Gallery Label:
Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770) was an aspiring poet and author of a brilliant series of forgeries that he successfully passed off as the rediscovered work of a medieval English monk. The dishonor of his eventual exposure led the teenaged poet to commit suicide in a London garret. He became revered among nineteenth-century poets as a martyr of frustrated genius. In keeping with Chatterton’s status, and Henry Wallis’s own admiration for the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood, the painter incorporates abundant detail into his representation of the poet’s death. This is a smaller replica of the version shown at the Royal Academy in 1856, which prompted the influential art critic John Ruskin to exhort his contemporaries to “examine it well inch by inch.” The artist Augustus Egg bought the larger version, and his own contemporaneous painting The Death of Buckingham (shown nearby) shares obvious affinities with Wallis’s Chatterton. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016