Pencil Drawing – The Prisoner of Chillon – Compositional Study

This is a compositional study for an illustration by Ford Madox Brown to Byron’s poem ‘The Prisoner of Chillon.’ Dalziel undertook the engraving for Rea Willmott’s ‘Poets of the Nineteenth Century,’ 1854. Whilst living in Paris in 1843 Brown completed a painting of the same subject but using a very different composition. Both versions show an interest in the contrast of light and shade but the later drawing focuses on the dead body in the foreground and the grouping of figures in a narrow space.