Joseph Severnthe HearthISFJ

On 23 February 1821, at about four in the afternoon, in a room beside the Spanish Steps in Rome, a dying poet asked a young painter to lift him up. Joseph Severn was 27. The poet was John Keats.

Severn had never been one of Keats's closest friends. In the autumn of 1820 Keats, ill with tuberculosis, was told to get away from the English winter, and someone had to go with him. Others could not go, or would not. Severn, a working painter with his own career to make, said yes.

Hearths often end up in the hardest room this way. Nobody picked them out. They were simply the one who said yes, and then they packed.

The two men sailed on the Maria Crowther on 17 September 1820 and took rooms at 26 Piazza di Spagna, in a city where neither had money to spare.

Keats got worse quickly. Severn nursed him, read to him and barely left the room. By mid-January he told their friend William Haslam that he had “the veriest load of care that ever came upon these shoulders of mine.”

He was a painter in Rome, the city every painter longed for, and he could not work. “If I could leave Keats for a while everyday I could soon raise money by my face painting,” he wrote, “but he will not let me out of his sight.”

He did not blame Keats. He told a friend what the care was costing him, which is the honest way to carry a load like that, and the step carers most often skip.

Keats saw the cost anyway. In the same letter, Severn passed on what the dying man had said to him.

That is the Hearth face exactly: steady at the bedside, churning underneath, and almost nobody notices the difference. Keats noticed, and he did not want it for his friend.

Late in January, sitting up through the night, Severn drew Keats asleep. Under the sketch he wrote that he had drawn it to keep himself awake, and that a deadly sweat had been on Keats all night. Even his art had become a way of keeping watch.

Then came that February afternoon. “Severn – I – lift me up – I am dying,” Keats said. Severn took him in his arms. At about eleven that night, Keats died.

Severn came out of it worn down by nights of watching, short of money and alone in a foreign city. He could have spent the rest of his life as the man who was there when Keats died. He stayed in Rome and built a life instead. Within the year Shelley thanked him in print, in the preface to Adonais. He made his name as a painter there, and from 1861 to 1872 he served as British consul in Rome.

He died on 3 August 1879, at 85, and was buried in the city's Protestant Cemetery, beside the friend he had once held in his arms.