Painting words: Severn’s visual dialogue with Keats in The Fountain (1828)

Abstract

Although the painter Joseph Severn left little in the way of textual commentary on Keats’s poetry in his extensive body of letters and memoirs, he did offer a rich analysis and response to the poet’s verse in his artwork, especially his portraits and his best early painting, The Fountain (1828). The picture not only provides a sophisticated reading of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) but also offers a coded assessment of Keats’s legacy. Further, it wrestles with the public debate over the causes of Keats’s death and, in the end, acts as a complex private memorial to the intense friendship between painter and poet. Severn’s picture takes as its textual source an influential poem by Samuel Rogers and as its visual sources a network of paintings, sculpture, and sketches that lend a multidimensional context to what appears at first to be a straightforward Italian genre scene. Together with key passages from his letters, these artworks persuade us that Severn had more on his mind than a pastoral landscape and that he was quietly revising and adapting the Greek myth of Hylas to explore the cultural debate surrounding the death of Keats and his own private grief.