But despite Keats’ obscurity in life and immortality in death, the very fact that he had his face cast in 1816 might speak for a self-confidence lurking beneath the ephemeral doubts.

The opposing trajectory of both men’s careers offer some insight into the nature of how reputations are made. Haydon struggled against the spirit of the age before committing suicide in 1846, whilst in the years after Keats’ death, he and his poems came to embody the very essence of Romanticism.

Would Shelley have endorsed the genius of a rival poet, who had lived a long and comfortable life? Longevity offers more time for an artist to rise but it also gives them more time to fall. Keats’s legacy benefitted from a premature death. That he was taken in his prime saw that close friends, animated by the injustices of fate, took to promoting his poetry with zeal.

Haydon’s decline is more idiosyncratic and fewer lessons can be taken from it. His artistic profile was largely cultivated by himself, and when he was no longer alive to defend his paintings, or to promote them via endless pamphlets, history came to see him as the eccentric author of ungainly canvases that few could display, let alone buy.

The less sympathetic saw him as a dilletante, concealing his llimitations in the frequent, forceful assertions that he was a genius ordained by God.

If he was a genius, then it might not have been as a painter. Dickens felt that he had “mistaken his vocation." Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf felt similarly, perceiving that he gave himself to the wrong field, that the force of his pen repeatedly came to the aid of his paintbrush.