Joseph Severn was an English portrait and subject painter and a personal friend of the English poet John Keats. He exhibited portraits, Italian genre, literary and biblical subjects, and a selection of his paintings can today be found in some of the most important museums in London, including the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Britain.
Joseph Severn (self-portrait)
John Keats by Severn 1819
Posthumous Portrait of Shelley Writing Prometheus Unbound (1845)
Edward John Trelawny, by Severn
John Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces".
Posthumous portrait by William Hilton, c. 1822
Life mask of Keats by Benjamin Haydon, 1816
Wentworth Place, now the Keats House museum (left), Ten Keats Grove (right), Hampstead Heath, London
Ambrotype of Fanny Brawne taken circa 1850 (photograph on glass)