On a Saturday afternoon in November, we gathered at Keats House Museum in Hampstead for the purpose of exploring Keats’s legacy through drawing. Made possible by generous funding from BARS’s Conference and Seminar Support and Northeastern University London, and the support of Keats House, ‘Drawing Keats’s London’ was part of the Being Human Festival. This year’s theme for the festival was ‘Landmarks’, and it felt apt to be reflecting on this theme at Keats House, which is such a key landmark for British Romanticism and literary London.
The free workshop formed part of a series of events organised by my colleagues at Northeastern University London. It originated from a chapter which I wrote about Keats’s relationship to the city, and his writing about urban nature, for Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration (Bloomsbury, 2024), edited by Charlotte Grant and Alistair Robinson. Co-led by artist Celeste Anstruther and myself, the purpose of the event was to introduce Keats’s work to new audiences, to engage the attendees with Keats’s poetry and his legacy in a novel and tactile way, and to encourage attendees to delineate their own relationship to Keats and the museum. At the end of the workshop, attendees were invited to write short reflections on their experiences of the event, and it was brilliant to see some remarking upon their new-found enjoyment of Keats’s work; one wonderfully wrote that they will ‘be reading Keats from now on’.
In the Nightingale Room.
We began by gathering in the Nightingale Room, with its tall windows giving expansive views of the museum’s garden, where I gave a short introduction on the relationship between Keats’s life and his work as a Londoner, and his relationship to the visual arts. I wanted to stress Keats’s unusual relationship to the city: despite spending the majority of his life in what would now count as Greater London, Keats very rarely made any mention of urban life in his poems and is best known for his nature poetry. Born in Moorgate, Keats spent a substantial part of his childhood in then-rural Enfield and Edmonton; after a short spell in Southwark for his medical studies, he settled in suburban Hampstead, with which he is most firmly associated. Keats’s cross-city migrations found an echo in our own journeys on the day, as we all travelled to Keats House from different parts of London.
Many of the attendees had not been to Keats House previously, and we spoke about Keats’s relationship to the house. Ironically, what is now Keats House was never Keats’s house in his lifetime: he lived there as a lodger of his friend Charles Armitage Brown, sometimes needing to vacate the house when Brown sublet it during the summer. His slightly precarious living situation reflects the broader material and financial pressures of living in London, which remains the case for many today. Nature and the imagination are some of the few things which the city offers freely to all of its inhabitants, and we spoke about the way that this perhaps explains Keats’s repeated returns to natural subjects in his poems.
Celeste took over the second part of the workshop, leading us through a series of drawing exercises. The Nightingale Room was perfect for this, as there were plenty of unusual, and beautiful, architectural features to focus on. The expanse of windows meant that we were able to draw the garden too, such as the mulberry tree, which probably would have been growing there in Keats’s time too. We also had some fruits – apples, pears, pomegranates – and autumnal leaves scattered on the tables to help anchor our attention.
Celeste was brilliant at helping us reflect on the purpose of what we were doing in the context of the museum and Keats’s work. Each task asked us to focus our attention upon an object, and to think how we might try to convey the material presence of the chandelier, the corner of a window frame, the pear, or the leaf, in two dimensions. Some of the exercises only gave us a short amount of time to draw an object; one required us to draw with our non-dominant hand. Another demanded that we draw something with a single continuous line, without ever lifting our pencils, sharpening our attention to the way that objects relate to, and flow into, one another. These were also exercises in negative capability, asking us to be, in Keats’s terms, ‘content with half-knowledge’ as we drew and had to let go of our desire for knowable outcomes.
The outcomes of different exercises.
In the final part of the workshop, everybody scattered around the museum. Keats House holds a number of items which Keats owned, or which would have been in the building during his time, and some attendees chose to depict those in their drawings: a life-mask of Keats, the engagement ring which he had given to Fanny Brawne, Joseph Severn’s portrait of Keats on his deathbed. Others focused on the balanced architectural proportions of the house. One attendee wrote in their reflection that they were thinking about Keats’s ‘To Autumn’, and were ‘inspired to draw the scene from the window that Keats would have looked on’, to capture ‘the beauty of the season of “mist and mellow fruitfulness”’. Another noted that they ‘focused on finding “personal” impressions in the house […,] anything that would speak of the people that walked these halls’.
The museum is encouraging us to enter this kind of make-believe. Providing period-appropriate furniture, it suggests that envisaging the way that life was led in the building in Keats’s time will help us understand Keats and his work more clearly too. We were generously welcomed to Keats House on a Saturday, when the museum is normally closed, which was wonderful. As we moved around the building, it began to feel less like a museum and more like a home, and helped us tease out the outline of Keats’s life in the house. It was a little like one of the exercises we did with Celeste, where we were asked to draw the space around an object rather than the object itself – and gradually, surprisingly, the object itself would take shape after all. Similarly, drawing at Keats House enabled us to feel Keats’s presence and absence, to hear the echo of the past in its rooms, and to imaginatively bridge the gap of two centuries between Keats’s time and our own.
Drawing in the house and garden.
Sharing drawings and reflections in the Nightingale Room.
Flora Lisica
Flora Lisica is Assistant Professor in English at Northeastern University London. She recently completed her PhD on Romantic literature at the University of Cambridge, and has published on Keats and Mary Shelley.