The posthumous lives of Joseph Severn’s portrait of John Keats and the autograph manuscript of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by Nigel à Brassard

Abstract: When the twenty-five-year-old John Keats died, his lungs completely destroyed by consumption, it would have been entirely reasonable to assume that the poet and his work would quickly be forgotten by all but ‘the dozen people who believed in his genius’. During his lifetime, the sales of his poetry had been disappointing, and the literary establishment had written excoriating reviews of his work. These have been described as ‘the most notorious critical attacks on a living poet in British literary history’. John Lockhart described ‘Endymion’ as ‘imperturbable drivelling idiocy’ and condescendingly dismissed Keats as ‘a young Cockney rhymester’. John Croker described Keats’s poetry as ‘the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language’. In the last few years of his life, Keats suffered as he witnessed the death from consumption of his mother and brother; he was weary from constant financial worries, his own health had deteriorated rapidly, and his heart ached from unrequited love for Fanny Brawne. It was little wonder that he said to Joseph Severn on the night of his death in Rome, ‘I am dying…thank God it has come’. At last ‘easeful death’ would permit him ‘to cease upon the midnight with no pain’. This essay examines a portrait of Keats painted by Joseph Severn and the original autograph manuscript of Ode to a Nightingale. It assesses their contribution in rescuing Keats from what seemed inevitable obscurity to become one of the most loved and celebrated among the English poets. Keats predicted that after his death he would be recognized among the English poets and expressed this in a letter to his brother.