Joseph Severn was Keats’s companion in Italy, and during the long, solitary weeks of his illness the most devoted nurse and friend. An aspiring artist, he remained in Rome after Keats’s death, and became a respected and well-liked member of the artistic community. He always knew, however, that it was as Keats’s friend that he would be remembered: ‘My coming with Keats and friendship for him will be a never fading Laurel’, he wrote. Severn returned to England in 1841, but twenty years later came back to Rome as Consul. ‘There is nothing in any circle that ever I saw or heard of, like what Mr. Joseph Severn then was in Rome’, wrote John Ruskin. ‘He understood everybody, native and foreign, civil and ecclesiastic, in what was nicest in them … and caught hearts of all in the golden net of his good will and good understanding.’ He died in Rome at the age of eighty-six, and is buried in the Non-Catholic Cemetery, alongside Keats.