Keats House in Hampstead

Wentworth Place in Hampstead, or Keats House as it is now called, was built by Charles Wentworth Dilke and Charles Armitage Brown during the winter of 1816-17 as a pair of semidetached houses. Keats moved into Brown’s half of the house immediately after the death of his brother Tom in December 1818, and lived there, on and off, for the next eighteen months. Hampstead was then a pleasant, secluded village four miles north of London, and the spring and summer of 1819 that Keats spent at Wentworth Place was the most creative period of his life. Here he wrote many of his greatest poems, including the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ – which, Brown later said, was written one morning under a plum tree in the garden. Sharing the garden were a Mrs Brawne and her three children, who had rented Dilke’s half of the house in April 1819. Keats fell in love with the eldest daughter, Fanny, and they became engaged. The house became a memorial to the poet in 1925.

Fuller, Ronald

April 1955

pen, ink and watercolor

aquarelle (technique)
landscapes (representations)

Keats House (Museum : London, England)

Gifted in the 1950s.

KSH

Severn Room

ART-012