‘Keats Listening to the Nightingale on Hampstead Heath’

John Keats is lost in thought and abandons his book and hat on the damp ground. It appears to be both day and night in this painting, which just like ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ invokes the feeling of moving between different worlds. Joseph Severn painted this in 1849, 28 years after Keats’s death. Severn was Keats’s friend and companion during the final months of his illness. He was deeply affected by Keats’s death and continued to paint him and scenes from his poetry decades later.