Haydon, BENJAMIN ROBERT

Haydon, BENJAMIN ROBERT, historical painter, whose biography forms one of the saddest pages in the record of British art, was born at Plymouth on 25th January 1786. He attended the grammar-school of Plympton, where Sir Joshua Reynolds had been educated; and his father, a bookseller, being desirous that his son should follow his own trade, placed him in his shop. But, in spite of delicate eyesight, the boy was resolved to become a painter, and in May 1804 he was admitted a student of the Royal Academy, where he was befriended and influenced by Fuseli, the keeper. Three years later he exhibited his first picture, 'Joseph and Mary resting on the Road to Egypt,' and after studying assiduously for three months the Elgin marbles, whose purchase by the nation he afterwards enthusiastically advo- cated, he produced his 'Dentatus,' a commission from Lord Mnlgrave. The work was coldly received by the Academy in 1809, and hung in the anteroom; and this treatment was the beginning of the painter's rupture with that body, which embittered his life and damaged his prospects. In the following year he began a large subject from Macbeth, which had been commissioned by Sir George Beaumont, but was afterwards declined. He was more successful with his 'Judgment of Solomon,' probably his finest production, now in the collection of Lord Ashburton, which he sold for 700 guineas. It gained a prize of 100 guineas from the Royal Institution, which had awarded a like sum for the 'Dentatus.' Having visited the Continent with Wilkie in 1814, and studied the old masters in the Louvre, Haydon began his 'Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,' which was completed in 1820, and realised £1700 by exhibition in the Egyptian Hall, London. It is now in the art-gallery of Philadelphia. Another immense religious subject, 'The Raising of Lazarus,' was completed in 1823, in the midst of great difficulties. The artist had been arrested for debt during its progress, and during the rest of his life he was never able to free himself from financial embarrassments, though it was proved that during six years, from 1831 to 1836, he had earned £4617 by his art. His 'Mock Election,' purchased by George IV. for 500 guineas, was founded upon a scene witnessed by the painter while a prisoner in King's Bench. He resorted to every kind of expedient to meet the needs of the moment. Greatly against his will he took to portrait-painting; a public subscription was raised on his behalf; he raffled his 'Eucles' and 'Xenophon's First Sight of the Sea;' he delivered a popular series of lectures on painting and design in 1836, published in two volumes in 1844. In 1832 Lord Gray commissioned the well-known picture of 'The Reform Banquet,' and in 1834 the Duke of Sutherland gave 400 guineas for a 'Cassandra.' Haydon had never wearied of urging upon government and persons of influence the necessity for the national encouragement of art, and it was a bitter disappointment when he failed to obtain employment by the commissioners for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament. He was further crushed by the entire want of success which attended his exhibition of two completed pictures from the designs which he had prepared for the cartoon competition; his mind gave way, and on 20th June 1846 he shot himself in his studio before his unfinished painting of 'Alfred's First Parliament.' The works of Haydon are elevated in aim and subject, and Mr G. F. Watts, R.A., has pronounced that 'his expression of anatomy and general perception of form are the best by far that can be found in the English school, and I feel even a direction towards something that is only to be found in Phidias.' His works, however, are very unequal in their several parts; his execution was seldom equal throughout to his conception; and most of his productions bear only too evident traces of the haste and the untoward circumstances amid which they were executed. See the Life of Haydon, from his Autobiography and Journals, edited by Tom Taylor (3 vols. 1853); and his Correspondence and Table Talk, with a Memoir by his son (1876).