The Prisoner of Chillon: study of a corpse 

Ford Madox Brown

Date: 1856

Materials: Pencil 

The poems of Byron

On Rossetti's recommendation, the wood engravers George and Edward Dalziel asked Brown in 1856 for an illustration to Byron's poem 'The Prisoner of Chillon', for a book edited by the Rev. R. Willmott, 'The Poets of the Nineteenth Century'. Brown was a lifelong admirer of Byron, and had already painted the subject in 1843; the stoical hero of the poem is imprisoned in a dungeon with his two brothers, each chained to a column, and is forced to watch both die.

A splendid corpse

In a rather macabre pursuit of Pre-Raphaelite truth to nature, Brown asked his friend John Marshall, an assistant surgeon at University College Hospital, London, to arrange access to a real corpse. He confided in his diary, 

"Often as I have seen horrors, I really did not remember how hideous the shell of a poor creature may remain when the substance contained is fled. Yet we both declared it to be lovely & a splendid corps[e]".