Thomas Buchanan Read (March 12, 1822 – May 11, 1872), was an American poet and portrait painter. Biography Read was born in Corner Ketch, a hamlet close to Downingtown, 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. He was interred at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. 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 References "Read, Thomas Buchanan." American Authors 1600–1900. H. W. Wilson Company, NY 1938. worldcat, accessdate= September 7, 2008 External links 1822 births 1872 deaths 19th-century American poets American male poets 19th-century American painters 19th-century American male artists American male painters American portrait painters People from Chester County, Pennsylvania Poets from Pennsylvania Painters from Pennsylvania American expatriates in Italy Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state) Burials at Laurel Hill Cemetery (Philadelphia) 19th-century American male writers