Painted when the artist was twenty-two, The Death of Brunelleschi (Leighton House; repr. Leonée and Richard Ormonds', Lord Leighton, 1975, pl.23) was Leighton's first major work, although it belongs to a group of early paintings illustrating the lives of Renaissance painters, culminating in Cimabue's Madonna (Royal Collection; on loan to the National Gallery), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1855. In October 1846 Leighton had entered the Städelsches Kunstinstitut at Frankfurt to begin his formal art education. Though forced to leave when revolution broke out in 1848, he was back by the summer of 1850, studying under the artist who did so much to influence his development, Edward von Steinle. The Death of Brunelleschi was the chief product of this second Frankfurt period. An ambitious work, over eight foot high, it was painted in secret and caused a sensation when exhibited at the Institute in the summer of 1852, shortly before Leighton's departure for Rome on the next stage of his long European apprenticeship.

The present sketch seems to be unpublished and unknown to scholarship. It is certainly not listed in the Ormonds monograph, although they do mention studies for the picture in the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert, and the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle (op cit., p.150, under no.14). It differs considerably from the finished work, although all the main elements - the dying architect, the doctor, the foreground figures, the dog, and the Duomo in the distance - are present. The girl seated in the picture's right foreground was modelled from the artist's younger sister Augusta, who owned the sketch according to the note on the back. She married Arthur Matthews, son of the British consul general in Florence, in 1859.