Thomas Buchanan Read

Thomas Buchanan Read (March 12, 1822 – May 11, 1872), was an American poet and portrait painter.

Read was born in Corner Ketch, a hamlet close to Downington, in Chester County, Pennsylvania on March 12, 1822.

Beside painting, Read wrote a prose romance, The Pilgrims of the Great St. Bernard, and several books of poetry, including The New Pastoral, The House by the Sea, Sylvia, and A Summer Story. Some of the shorter pieces included in these, e.g., Sheridan's Ride, Drifting, The Angler, The Oath, and The Closing Scene, have great merit. Read was briefly associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His greatest artistic popularity took place in Florence. Among portraits he painted were Abraham Lincoln, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning and William Henry Harrison. Read died from injuries sustained in a carriage accident, which weakened him and led him to contract pneumonia while on shipboard returning to America.

Literary works:
Poems. 1847
The Female Poets of America With Portraits, Biographical Notices, and Specimens of Their Writings. 1849
Lays and Ballads 1849
Thoraren the Skald. 1850
The Stolen Child. 1850
Edward A. Brackett's Marble Group of the Shipwrecked Mother and Child. 1852
The Pilgrims of the Great St. Bernard. 1853
The New Pastoral. 1855
The House by the Sea. A Poem. 1855
Sylvia, or, The Last Shepherd An Eclogue, and Other Poems. 1857
Rural Poems. 1857
James L. Claghorn, Esq. 1860
Sheridan's Ride. 1864
The Descent of the Eagle. 1865
The Soldier's Friend. 1865
The Eagle and the Vulture. 1866
The Poetical Works of Thomas Buchanan Read: Complete in Three Volumes. 1867
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