Very little is known about Clifton. A painter of historical and literary subjects, he exhibited three pictures at the Royal Academy 1852-69, and two at the British Institution 1861-67. He is recorded living in London in 1852, but had moved to Oxford by 1857. Like so many artists, he came under Pre-Raphaelite influence in the 1850s. The possibility should be considered that he knew Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones and their friends when they went to Oxford in the Long Vacation of 1857 to paint Arthurian murals in the Debating Chamber at the Union.

The present picture, an illustration to Coleridge's poem 'Love' painted in the 1850s in an extreme Pre-Raphaelite style, is perhaps his most important surviving work. Dr. Judith Bronkhurst has made the interesting suggestion that it is inspired by Rossetti's drawing Genevieve, dated 1848 (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; see Virginia Surtees, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford, 1971, no. 38 and pl. 23). Like the painting, the drawing illustrates Coleridge's poem, and there are many compositional similarities. If Clifton did indeed know the drawing, it would be interesting to know how and when. The drawing was made for the Cyclographic Society, a short-lived body to which several members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle belonged at about the time the Brotherhood was launched in 1848. Rossetti gave it to Coventry Patmore, who later gave it to Burne-Jones.