In 1856, on Rossetti's recommendation, the wood engravers George and Edward Dalziel asked Brown to design an illustration to Byron's poem 'The Prisoner of Chillon', for an anthology edited by the Rev. R. A. Willmott, 'The Poets of the Nineteenth Century'. Brown was a lifelong admirer of Byron, and had already painted the subject in 1843. The stoical hero of the poem is imprisoned in a dungeon with his two brothers, each chained to a column, and is forced to watch both die.

To make his illustration as realistic as possible Brown asked his friend John Marshall, an assistant surgeon at University College Hospital, London, to arrange access to a cadaver. Brown spent two days making this study of the dead body, arranging the corpse as he wanted it, even including a rope to stand in for the chain that ties the dead brother to the wall. On 13 April 1856 he described the sombre task in his diary:

'Out shopping, then to University hospital to ask John Marshall about a dead boddy [sic]. He got the one that will just do. It was in the vaults under the dissecting room. When I saw it first, what with the dim light, the brown & parchment like appearance of it & the shaven head, I took it for a wooden imulation [sic] of the thing. Often as I have seen horrors I really did not remember how hideous the shell of a poor creature may remain when the substance contained is fled. Yet we both in our joy at the obtainment of what we sought declared it to be lovely & a splendid corps [sic]. Marshall evidently loves a thing of the kind.'

The next day he finished the study noting with a sense of macabre, 'draw the corps [sic] till ½ past 2. Got on quite merrily & finished it 2 hours sooner than was obligate on me. As I was going met Marshall who could not keep away from the sweets of the charnel house' (Virginia Surtees, ed., 'The Diary of Ford Madox Brown,' p. 137).

In a rather macabre pursuit of Pre-Raphaelite truth to nature, Brown asked his friend John Marshall, an assistant surgeon at University College Hospital, London, to arrange access to a real corpse. 'Often as I have seen horrors', he confided in his diary, 'I really did not remember how hideous the shell of a poor creature may remain when the substance contained is fled. Yet we both declared it to be lovely & a splendid corpse.'
LM