La Mort de Chatterton

Thomas Chatterton was 17 when he swallowed arsenic in a London attic in 1770, a poet too poor to eat and too proud to say so. By the 1850s he had become a kind of patron saint to young Romantics, the boy genius the world let starve. Henry Wallis shows him at the moment just after death, torn manuscripts scattered on the floor, dawn coming up over the rooftops through the little window. The model was a young writer named George Meredith, then unknown. There is a bitter footnote: a few years later Meredith's wife left him for Wallis. Ruskin told visitors to the Royal Academy summer show to stop and look, and called the picture faultless.