In December 1816, the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon made a casting of John Keats's face just as the poet was beginning to feel the symptoms of the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. [1] Only a few months beforehand, Keats, who had just written his first great sonnet, 'On First looking into Chapman's Homer,’ [2] was introduced to Haydon by their mutual friend Charles Cowden Clarke. ‘I will be as punctual as the Bee to the Clover,’ Keats assured Cowden Clarke. ‘Very glad am I at the thoughts of seeing so soon this glorious Haydon and all his Creation.’ [3] In Keats and the Mirror of Art, Ian Jack describes the quick and ardent friendship that began, 'Haydon took to Keats no less whole-heartedly than Keats had taken to Haydon. "Keats is the only man I ever met with," he was soon to write in his Diary, "who is conscious of a high call and is resolved to sacrifice his life to attain it." [4] Over the next few months Keats met many of the illustrious circle that were to become part of his beau monde, which he himself would later refer to in a letter to his sister Georgiana, as 'Haydon and Co.' [5] Writing to Cowden Clarke, on 9 October 1816, Keats reckoned that this was the propitious beginning of ‘an era in my existence’. Shortly thereafter, he met, among others, the poet and satirist John Hamilton Reynolds, Percy Bysshe Shelley, [6] William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Charles Ollier, and John Taylor. Ollier, with his brother James, and Taylor, together with his friend James Augustus Hessey, were the publishers of Keats’s poetry during his lifetime. [7] ‘For the young poet they were an encouraging group; without exception, they saw him as a poet of high promise, possibly of future greatness.’ [8]

A year later, in December 1817, Haydon arranged for Keats to meet William Wordsworth. [9] As G.M. Matthews relates in his Critical Heritage, ‘Wordsworth, always thrifty in his praise of others, was nevertheless the first major poet to express admiration of Keats’s work.’ [10] In a letter to Haydon dated 16 January 1820, [11] Wordsworth asks ‘How is Keates, he is a youth of promise too great for the sorry company he keeps.’ [12] The story of Keats and Wordsworth’s introductory meeting was first reported to the poet Edward Moxon in a letter from Haydon in 1845: ‘Keats expressed to me as we walked to Queen Anne St East wh're Mr Monkhouse lodged, the greatest, the purest, the most unalloyed pleasure at the prospect. Wordsworth received him kindly, & after a few minutes, Wordsworth asked him what he had been lately doing, I said he has just finished an exquisite ode to Pan - and as he had not a copy I begged Keats to repeat it - which he did in his usual half chant, (most touching) walking up & down the room - when he had done I felt really, as if I had heard a young Apollo - Wordsworth drily said “a Very pretty piece of Paganism”. This was unfeeling, & unworthy of his high Genius to a young Worshipper like Keats - & Keats felt it deeply…. it was rather Ill-bred to hurt a youth, at such a moment when he actually trembled, like the String of a Lyre, when it has been touched.’ [13] Although Wordsworth’s response left a lasting sting for Keats, [14] with Haydon, the young poet had found a steadfast champion. [15] In March 1817, Keats’s first book of Poems was published by the Ollier brothers; Haydon heralded it as a ‘flash of lightening that will rouse men from their occupations, and keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that will follow.’ [16]

On 17 December 1816, Keats wrote to Cowden Clarke, 'My dear Charles, You may now look at Minerva's Aegis with impunity seeing that my awful Visage did not turn you into a John Doree you may have accordingly a legitimate title to a Copy - I will use my interest to procure it for you.' [17] Several copies of Haydon’s life mask of Keats survive, a number of which were made for the poet’s close friends. Among these is the version commissioned for John Hamilton Reynolds, now in the National Portrait Gallery. For a clearer sense of Haydon’s casting method, we may look to an entry in his journals dated 4 May 1821, describing an aborted attempt to cast Lord Francis Jeffrey’s face [18]:

'By this time Jeffrey's coat was off, his chin towelled, his face greased, the plaster ready, and the ladies watching everything with the most intense interest. Mrs. Jeffrey began to look anxious, the preparations for casting a face being something like those for cutting off a man's head. Not liking to seem too fond before others, she fidgeted in her seat, and at last settled on the sofa with her smelling-bottle, barely visible, grasped tightly in her hand. The plaster was now brought, a spoonful taken up, Jeffrey ordered to keep his mouth closed, his nerve firm, and the visitors be quiet. Sydney Smith was dying with laughter, and kept trying to make Jeffrey laugh, but it would nor do. When Jeffrey's face was completely covered, up jumped Sydney, mock heroically, exclaiming: “There's immortality! but God keep me from such a mode of obtaining it.” Unfortunately Jeffrey's nostrils were nearly blocked up, breathing became difficult, his nerve gave way and the mould was obliged to be jerked off and broken. So much for this attempt at immortality.' [19]