The Autobiography of Benjamin Robert Haydon by Benjamin Robert Haydon

First published: 1853

Type of work: Memoir

Critical Evaluation:

It is one of fate’s curious tricks that as Benjamin Robert Haydon’s reputation as a historical painter has diminished since his lifetime, the estimation of his writings has risen correspondingly. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the years principally covered by the AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Haydon’s friends gave encouragement and much-needed financial assistance to his efforts to bring England to an appreciation of the ideals of High Art, which to Haydon meant historical painting on an epic, Raphaelesque scale. His excursions with the pen, however, were inconveniently likely to bring enmity and spite on the impetuous head of the young painter; and it was earnestly wished by his friends that he would wield the brush instead of the pen.

Now, a century after his death, Haydon’s merit as an artist is dubious. There are suggestions that he be redeemed somewhat from the obscurity and neglect he has fallen into, but these are by no means strong enough for him to be considered a central figure in the history of painting. But his intimacy with prominent social and literary figures of the English Romantic period, his spirited style of writing, and his faithful recording of his activities, thoughts, and impressions of people, make his autobiography and journals a rich source of information for anyone interested in the background of English life in the early nineteenth century.

The AUTOBIOGRAPHY covers the period from his birth in 1786 to 1820. Haydon began writing it, working from recollection and from the journals he kept throughout his life, in 1842. His suicide at the age of sixty cut short the writing, but the rest of his life can be traced in the twenty-six bulky volumes of his journals. Had we only the AUTOBIOGRAPHY, however, we would still obtain an accurate portrait of the man. Even in his youth the impassioned qualities of his character glow through the pages: pride, hotheadedness, tenacity to a principle, incompetence in his financial affairs, stanch patriotism, devotion to the ideals of art, and indomitable optimism.

Haydon’s early determination to devote himself to art met with equally early and long-continued opposition from his family. His parents expected him to take over their prosperous bookseller’s shop in Plymouth, but by the age of sixteen the boy hated everything connected with the business and was already set upon becoming a great painter. He relates in his memoirs the family crises that occurred as a result. At last his ambitions were taken seriously, however, and his father, sending him off to London to study art, agreed to support him as long as possible.

The enthusiasm in Haydon’s account of his early adventures, even in a retrospect of almost forty years, attests to the nearly frenzied energy with which at the time he plunged into his new career. Chronically poor eyesight could not deter him, and even recurring periods of near-blindness only increased his industry when the danger to his eyes had passed. He studied anatomy; he became acquainted with the prominent painters of London (whose contradictory counsels confirmed him in his own ideas about art). With one of his fellow-students, David Wilkie, Haydon began in 1805 a friendship that influenced both men as mature artists.

The narrative of the AUTOBIOGRAPHY fairly bristles with enthusiasm as Haydon describes his early struggles for recognition and commissions. Excerpts from his journals are often introduced to trace the progress of a painting. Comments frequently appear wishing that he could do without sleep or food to finish the work more efficiently. His ambitions for greatness seem always to have been at fever-heat, and when his friends predicted that his second major painting, “The Assassination of Dentatus,” would change England’s entire conception of art, Haydon was filled with hope that it should be so.

Consequently, the cold reception of his painting by the Royal Academy seemed cruel and incomprehensible to him. The painters who formed the Royal Academy were Haydon’s detractors throughout his career. He was too individual, iconoclastic, and impetuous for their taste; and their tyrannizing over art, their pomposity and petty jealousies, inflamed him. The enmity that began with the unfavorable treatment of Haydon’s painting of Dentatus became a feud that lasted for years. He opposed the academicians individually and as a group; he conducted wars with them in periodical magazines; he argued in society against the monopolization of art criticism by these connoisseurs, when it ought to be the province of working artists. As a result of Haydon’s attacks on the Academy, he went for long periods of his life without commissions, without income, and without encouragement by influential people. But his courageous defense of his own ideals against the Academy never abated.

The cause celebre of Haydon’s career in argumentation was that of the Elgin Marbles, a group of Grecian sculptures brought to England by the Earl of Elgin. Haydon was enraptured by the sculptures from his first sight of them. He made countless drawings from them and casts of them. The AUTOBIOGRAPHY is filled with references to the perfection of anatomy in the human figures, the grace and cleanliness of their lines, the strength and fluidity they suggested. Haydon eagerly supported Lord Elgin’s attempt to interest the British government in purchasing the marbles for the nation; but Payne Knight, as spokesman for the Royal Academy, gave such an unfavorable judgment on them that they dropped immediately in public estimation. Haydon waged a pen-and-ink war on their behalf in which his courageous enthusiasm for the sculptures was exceeded only by the imprudence of some of his criticisms of their detractors. Although his writings deepened the personal animosity many felt for him, Haydon was a significant force behind the eventual purchase of the marbles for the British Museum in 1816.

The matter of the Elgin Marbles was only one instance of Haydon’s aroused pertinacity in his principles of art. From the beginning of his career, the AUTOBIOGRAPHY traces an overpowering concern for what he called “High Art.” He believed passionately in a “Grand Style,” in the moral beauty of painting, in a strict and loving adherence to nature in art. Singlehandedly, he undertook a mission to educate the British nation to an acceptance of his high ideals. But public taste is a capricious thing; the fashionable world preferred to be amused rather than edified; and Haydon never reached his goal.

He never gave it up; constant failure could not calm the enthusiasm he had displayed in the years of the AUTOBIOGRAPHY. At the end of each year he habitually reviewed his life, with strong self-criticism and earnest plans to become more disciplined, more industrious, and more grateful to God for his accomplishments. His faith in Christianity and the providence of God sustained him through the darkest failures and always reinspired him to go on. We see in the AUTOBIOGRAPHY that each painting was begun and forwarded with repeated prayer, and completed with humble thanks to God, the source of his inspiration.

It was a rigorous regime Haydon set up when he painted. Working in tiny, cramped quarters with a canvas as large as the room would hold, he painted for hours, all night and on into the next day. He would re-do a head ten times if necessary, until it satisfied him. In intervals between painting he would read for inspiration, in the historians, Homer, Virgil, sometimes in contemporary novelists. On the occasions when he went into society instead of painting, he felt remorse and contempt for himself afterward. The most relentless application to the work at hand was always his working habit, and he seemed to thrive on it, despite the ruin of his eyesight, despite the debts that began to accumulate immediately after his father was obliged to cease his financial support, in 1810.

Haydon described himself once in the AUTOBIOGRAPHY as having air-balloons under his armpits and ether in his soul. This is a fair description of the usual state of his spirits. But these empyrean aspirations were little help to him in practical matters. About the state of his finances he seemed totally incompetent. Were it not for the continual support of friends, Haydon would certainly have been ruined in short order. He did, however, have numerous friends. His incursions into the literary world brought him into close relations with Scott, Hazlitt, Shelley, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Wordsworth, and Keats. Particularly close was Haydon’s friendship with the last two; they addressed several poems to Haydon, as did Hunt, Lamb, and Elizabeth Barrett, among others.

The word-pictures Haydon gives in the AUTOBIOGRAPHY of these literary celebrities are some of the most delightful parts of his memoirs. With the painter’s eye for physical detail, he had also an appreciation of characteristics of mind and behavior, so that his descriptions of them suggest vividly their personalities.

Though the enmity of the Royal Academy prevented Haydon from attaining any highly respected position in England, he was highly regarded outside his country. The great Italian artist, Canova, confirmed Haydon’s opinion of the Elgin Marbles in every respect; the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg made him a member; Goethe praised him. But Haydon went without commissions in London, and became more and more deeply entangled with creditors and moneylenders.

Haydon’s eminence seems to have been a spasmodic thing. To admire his paintings was occasionally the fashionable rage. When his “Christ Entering Jerusalem” was first exhibited in 1820, the whole of Piccadilly was blocked with carriages of people to see it; the receipts for admission amounted to ‗GCP‗1,760. But no one wanted to buy it, and no one felt inclined to commission another painting from the artist. Such disappointments happened continually to Haydon. His reaction was invariably incredulity, dismay, rebellion, and then the purchase (on credit) of a larger canvas to begin an even greater work.

It is at a point like this that the AUTOBIOGRAPHY breaks off, with Haydon projecting a more magnificent picture, “The Healing of Lazarus.” It does not tell us of Haydon’s eventual marriage to the young widow he loved, their happiness at first, the deaths of five of their children, increasing burdens of debt, his four imprisonments for debt, and his suicide, by gunshot and razor slash, in 1846. Haydon died as extravagantly as he lived; and the account he left of his life, in the AUTOBIOGRAPHY and his journals, is perhaps a greater example of the Grand Style in art than any of his paintings.