William Hilton’s Lost Drawing of Keats

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William Hilton is well-known for producing the iconic image of Keats, the ca. 1822 portrait currently on loan from the National Portrait Gallery to Keats House, Hampstead. This famous painting of the poet gazing into the distance, chin in hand, was not done from life, but was instead based on an oil-on-ivory miniature produced three years earlier by Joseph Severn. Ironically, Hilton’s own original depiction of Keats—a chalk drawing from ca. 1820 commissioned by John Taylor—has long since disappeared, and is known to us now from an 1840 engraving by Charles Wass that was reproduced in several nineteenth-century editions of Keats’s poems.¹ The disappearance of Hilton’s drawing has long frustrated scholars. Extrapolating from the evidence of the Wass engraving, William Sharp asserted in 1906 that “Hilton’s fine, if too precise chalk drawing” was actually “of much more interest” than the surviving portrait after Severn’s miniature, and he hoped that “some day a (presumably) good early likeness of Keats of this Hilton-sketch period may be found.”² Fifty years later Donald Parson, the recognized authority on Keats representations, argued that Hilton was “far and away” a better draftsman than Severn and that there were bound to have been important similarities between the lost drawing and Haydon’s life mask of Keats.³ These scholars perceived that the chalk drawing could be important not simply for residual reliquary fascination but for the aesthetic documentation of Keats’s short life. Indeed, as William Michael Rossetti suggested in his 1887 Life of John Keats, the missing Hilton drawing, if found, might “assist us towards estimating what Keats was like about, or very soon before, the commencement of his fatal illness.”⁴

In Portraits of Keats (1956), Parson noted that “the last known owner of the original chalk drawing was John Taylor, 1841” (p. 171), a date that subsequent scholars have accepted. And the belief that the Hilton image “survives only in [the Wass] version” has held firm as well, repeated in recent years by Robert Woof and Stephen Hebron in John Keats, and by Sue Brown in her Joseph Severn: A Life, where she cites “Hilton’s elegant Olympian, known only from an engraving of the original chalk drawing done for Taylor.”⁵ Brown’s evocative description captures something of the peculiar majesty of Wass’s engraving, inevitably raising questions about the details of Hilton’s vanished drawing.

Recently, however, I have discovered that the lost Hilton image survives not only via the Wass engraving, but also through an 1865 copy made by George Scharf and held in the Heinz Archive of the National Portrait Gallery. Reproduced here for the first time, the Scharf sketch gives us a different, arguably superior sense of how Keats appeared to Hilton, and it reconciles the ornate, dark, and almost saddened mien of the Wass engraving with the more open countenance often assigned to the poet. Further, the circumstances under which Scharf’s copy was executed provide us a basis for constructing a provenance of the Hilton drawing all the way to the end of the nineteenth century. If the trail does seem to go cold after that, this new information nonetheless opens up lines of inquiry that may yet enable us to discover what happened to Hilton’s drawing. Such a recovery would be welcome, not only intrinsically, but also as a concrete reference point in the para-literary history of Keatsiana in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In what follows, I begin with events of March 1865, when the National Portrait Gallery was faced with a decision—and in some respects a financial dilemma—about which image or images of Keats to acquire: Hilton’s original chalk drawing, Hilton’s oil portrait based on the Severn miniature, or both.

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On March 17, 1865, the firm of Christie, Manson and Woods auctioned a group of thirty-three “Drawings and Pictures, chiefly by the late W. Hilton, R.A., the Property of the late John Taylor, Esq.” at their sale rooms in St. James’s...