^ Born on 21 February 1830: Henry Wallis, English Pre-Raphaelite painter, writer, and collector, who died on 20 December 1916.
— Wallis studied at the Royal Academy Schools of Art, and also at Gleyre's studio and the Beaux Arts in Paris between 1840 and 1850. He was a prolific painter and in later years painted in Italy, Sicily and Egypt. His most famous work is The Death of Chatterton, which portrays the death of the 17 year old poet Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide by taking arsenic. Chatterton was a brilliant young poet, influencing Keats and Wordsworth, who called him 'the Marvellous Boy'. The model for the dead poet was George Meredith, then aged about 28. Two years later Meredith's wife eloped with Wallis. Wallis painted the picture in the actual attic in Gray's Inn where Chatterton died.
— Wallis first studied at F. S. Cary’s academy and in 1848 entered the Royal Academy Schools, London. He is also thought to have trained in Paris at some time in the late 1840s or early 1850s, first in Charles Gleyre’s atelier and subsequently at the École des Beaux-Arts. He specialized in portraits of literary figures and scenes from the lives of past writers, as in Dr. Johnson at Cave’s, the Publisher (1854). His first great success was the Death of Chatterton , which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856. The impoverished late 18th-century poet Thomas Chatterton, who while still in his teens had poisoned himself in despair, was a romantic hero for many young and struggling artists in Wallis’s day. He depicted the poet dead in his London garret, the floor strewn with torn fragments of manuscript and, tellingly, an empty phial near his hand. The painting was universally praised, not least by John Ruskin who described it as ‘faultless and wonderful’, advising visitors to ‘examine it well, inch by inch’. Although Wallis was only loosely connected with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, his method and style in Chatterton reveal the importance of that connection: the vibrant colors and careful build-up of symbolic detail are typical Pre-Raphaelite concerns. The success of Chatterton was such that, when exhibited in Manchester the following year, it was protected from the jostling crowds by a policeman. It was bought by another artist, Augustus Egg.
     Wallis's next success came in 1858 with the exhibition at the Royal Academy of The Stonebreaker. Accompanied by quotations from Tennyson's poem A Dirge (1830) and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor resartus (1834), its theme was the human cost of hard labor and poverty. It showed a dead stone-breaker slumped by the roadside in a symbolically twilit landscape. Although Wallis was not the first to portray such hardships, his painting attracted much attention through its combination of shocking realism and glorious sunset. Critics disagreed about it: The Illustrated London News proclaimed it ‘shocks the sight and offends the sense', while The Spectator found it ‘a picture of the sacredness and solemnity which dwell in a human creature, however seared, and in death, however obscure'.
      In the early 1860s Wallis was an exhibitor, along with various Pre-Raphaelites, at the Hogarth Club, London. He also continued to show history paintings, many with a literary theme, at the Royal Academy until 1877. His work was engraved for the Art Journal, for example Found at Naxos, which appeared in 1878. He was also a prolific watercolorist, exhibiting over 80 examples at the Old Water-Colour Society, to which he was elected in 1880. He traveled widely in Europe and the Near East; many of his later paintings show scenes or events apparently witnessed during the course of his travels, such as Winnowing Corn, Capri (1862) and a watercolor of A Coffee Merchant, the Bazaar at Suez, exhibited at the Old Water-Colour Society in 1887. In late life he made less impact as a painter than he did as an authority on Italian and oriental ceramics, about which during the last two decades of his life he wrote a number of books and articles, many of them illustrated by his own drawings. He also built up a huge collection of ceramics, which is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In the 1890s he was also involved in campaigns to preserve ancient Egyptian monuments.

— LINKS
— The Stonebreaker (1857, 65x79cm _ ZOOM)
— The Death of Chatterton (1856, 61x91cm) _ The painting was exhibited with the following quotation from Marlowe: 'Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight / And burned is Apollo's laurel bough.'
— The Room in Which Shakespeare Was Born (1853, 29x42cm) _ Wallis launched his career exhibiting a sequence of paintings of interior scenes connected with the life of Shakespeare [1564-1616]. This one showing the playwright's birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon is based on a passage from a contemporary biography by Charles Knight (1842) describing 'the mean room, with its massive joists and plastered walls, firm with ribs of oak'. Wallis has painted the room in remarkable detail. Every nail securing the floorboards is visible. And Wallis has even taken note of Knight's passage describing how 'hundreds amongst the hundreds of thousands by whom that name is honoured have inscribed their names on the walls of the room.
— Bank of England & Royal Exchange, Cornhill, with King William Street (engraving, 20x41cm; full size)