The subject of the painting was the 17-year-old English
early Romantic poet
Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770), shown dead after he had poisoned himself with
arsenic in 1770. Chatterton was considered a
Romantic hero for many young and struggling artists in Wallis's time. Wallis's
Chatterton reveals his association with the Pre-Raphaelite style, seen in the vibrant colours and careful build-up of symbolic detail. He used a bold colour scheme with a contrasting palette and he exploited the fall of the natural light through the window of the garret to implement his much loved style at the time,
chiaroscuro. Wallis painted the work in a friend's chamber in
Gray's Inn, with
St Paul's Cathedral visible on the skyline through the window. It was probably a coincidence that this location was close to the garret in Brooke Street where Chatterton had died 86 years before. The painting was Wallis's first exhibited work. It was shown at the
Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1856, with a quotation from the
Tragedy of Doctor Faustus by
Christopher Marlowe inscribed on the frame: "Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burned is Apollo's laurel bough". It was an immediate success, with
John Ruskin describing it as "faultless and wonderful". It drew large crowds at the
Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857, was also exhibited in Dublin in 1859, and was one of the most popular paintings of the 19th century in reproductive print form. Wallis sold the painting to
Augustus Egg in 1856, and Egg sold the right to make engraved reproductions. The painting became the subject of a court case after Dublin photographer James Robinson was inspired to recreate the painting as a
tableau vivant so he could sell photographs of the scene. The painting was left to the
Tate Gallery by
Charles Gent Clement in 1899. There are two smaller versions of the same subject by Wallis, one either a study or a replica in the
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which measures by and, somewhat unusually for the period, a small oil-on-panel replica at the
Yale Center for British Art, which measures by . The Birmingham work was sold at
Christie's in 1875 to Baron
Albert Grant and then in 1877 to
William Kendrick, who donated it to the gallery in 1918. ==In popular culture==