2 - Several dead women and one dead man

Summary

John Everett Millais rowed back and forth across the Hogsmill River at Ewell to paint the densely planted bank for his work Ophelia (1851–2) (Plate 1) showing the tragic character from Shakespeare's Hamlet at the point of her death by drowning. While figures of dead women are common currency in nineteenth century literature and painting the Pre-Raphaelites take up the motif in singular ways. They also broach the subject of dead men in paintings such as Hunt's Rienzi and most spectacularly in Henry Wallis’ equally striking The Death of Chatterton (1855–6) (Plate 2). Though Millais’ Ophelia, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852, has become an uncontested emblem of Pre-Raphaelitism, in curious ways Wallis’ The Death of Chatterton amounts to its haunting double. Wallis depicts the young beautiful late-eighteenth century poet Thomas Chatterton lying dead in a poor garret room, having taken his own life with arsenic. When the seventeen year-old's claim to have discovered works by ‘Rowley’, a medieval priest, was discredited – Chatterton himself had invented them – he committed suicide penniless in the East End of London. In Wallis’ painting the torn up pieces of manuscript spilling from the trunk, signalling his act of ‘forgery’, occupy the bottom left of the composition while a phial emptied of its poison lies near his open hand. Ruskin wrote of it: ‘faultless and wonderful: a most noble example of the great school. Examine every inch: it is one of the pictures which intend and accomplish the entire placing before your eyes of an actual fact – and that a solemn one. Give it much time’ (Ruskin XIV, 60). But that ‘solemn’ and ‘actual fact’ to which Ruskin here refers is not at all clear. Is it the fact of suicide? The forgerer made tragic and effeminate in death: the ‘fact’ of bodily indeterminacy as standing in for aesthetic indeterminacy?

Without doubt, The Death of Chatterton raises the issue of effeminacy prior to D. G. Rossetti's and Swinburne's poetry. Indeed, the androgyny of the beautiful ‘boy’ perhaps goes some way to explaining why, when exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857, the painting famously required two policemen to protect it from an admiring crowd. The pallor of Chatterton's face, his striking shock of auburn hair, recalls that of the earlier ‘Ophelia’, exemplar of the school of Pre- Raphaelitism.