The Grave of Keats

In 1871 Crane married Mary Frances Andrews, and during a protracted Italian honeymoon, he evolved a personal style of gouache landscape painting. He reduced the range of colour and simplified the forms of the landscape to convey the sun-baked but luxuriant character of the Italian countryside.

John Keats (1795-1821) was an English poet prominent in the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He died in Rome aged twenty-five on February 23rd, 1821 and is buried at the Cimitero Acattolico - the so-called Protestant Cemetery in Rome. His grave is beneath the elderly shade trees in the old section of the graveyard, close to the Pyramid of Cestius.

Keats came to Rome in September 1820, already suffering from tuberculosis that would kill him five months later. His gravestone reads: This grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February 1821.

The painting shows the gravestone with the Pyramid of Cestius in the background.