Girometti was a leading carver of gems, coins, cameos and medallions. He was commissioned to make this portrait soon after Keats’s death, and probably based it on sketches by Severn and the death mask. Reynolds thought it the best of all likenesses of the poet, and Charles Brown, to whom it belonged, thought it ‘quite a piece of magic’. The portrait was later used as the basis for the 1875 memorial plaque of Keats in the Non-Catholic Cemetery by the American sculptor Warrington Wood.