Haydon (Benjamin Robert).
BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON was born on the 25th January, 1786. In common with most true artists, young Haydon early displayed an overpowering love for art. One of his most favourite studies is said to have been drawing the guillotine, with Louis taking leave of the people. At the age of thirteen he was taken to the grammar school at Plympton—the same at which Sir Joshua Reynolds was educated. From thence he was sent to Exeter, to study book-keeping, and at the end of six months was bound to his father for seven years. Within a short time of his signing his indentures, it was evident to both his father and his friends that young Haydon would never do as a tradesman. After much dissuasion, and against all remonstrance, Haydon collected his books and colours, packed up his things, and started for London, in May, 1804. He took lodgings at 342, Strand, and for nine months he saw nothing but his books, his casts, and his drawings. He was introduced by Prince Hoare to Northcote, Opie, and Fuseli; and it was the latter who got the young artist into the Academy. While studying at the Academy he became acquainted with Sachom and Wilkie. In 1807, Haydon’s first picture of “Joseph and Mary resting on the road to Egypt,” appeared. About this time his devotion to his art was very close. He rose as soon as he woke—be it three, four, or five,—when he would draw at anatomy until eight; in chalk from nine till one, and from half-past one till five; then walked, dined, and to anatomy again from seven to ten and eleven. Wilkie had obtained for the young artist a commission from Lord Mulgrave for “Dentatus.” Having delayed the painting some months, Haydon in 1808 removed his lodgings to 41, Great Marlborough Street, when he began the noble lord’s commission in earnest. In this year he first saw the Elgin marbles, and he thus expresses his admiration of them: “I felt the future; I foretold that they would prove themselves the finest things on earth—that they would overturn the false beau ideal, where nature was nothing, and would establish the true beau ideal, of which nature alone is the basis. I felt as if a divine truth had blazed inwardly upon my mind, and I knew they would at last rouse the art of Europe from its slumber in the darkness.” His “Dentatus” brought him a prize of one hundred guineas from the British Institution. His next picture, “Macbeth,” he was not so successful with, and did not get the prize that the painter had expected: to make things worse, he relieved himself by quarrelling with the Academy and painting “Solomon.” He then began that system of getting into debt, which was the curse of his whole after-life. His usual companions were Hazlitt, the Hunts, Barnes (of the Times), Jackson, Charles Lamb, and John Scott. His “Solomon” was so far a success, that it was sold for six hundred guineas. Also the British Institution voted one hundred guineas to him as a mark of their admiration of this picture. In 1820 he finished his celebrated picture “Entry of Christ into Jerusalem.” By exhibiting this picture in town, Haydon made a clear profit of £1298. He then set to work to finish his picture “Christ in the Garden,” and to sketch his “Lazarus:” the latter he determined should be his grandest and largest work. Having recently married, he wrote on the last day of 1821 as follows: “I don’t know how it is, but I get less reflective as I get older. I seem to take things as they come, without much care. In early life everything, being new, excites thought. As nothing is new when a man is thirty-five, one thinks less. Or, perhaps, being married to my dearest Mary, and having no longer anything to hope in love, I get more contented with my lot, which, God knows, is rapturous beyond imagination. Here I sit sketching, with the loveliest face before me, smiling and laughing, and solitude is not. Marriage has increased my happiness beyond expression. In the intervals of study, a few minutes’ conversation with a creature one loves is the greatest of all reliefs. God bless us both! My pecuniary difficulties are still great; but my love is intense, my ambition intense, and my hope in God’s protection cheering.” But the remainder of the painter’s life—25 years—was one dark cloud, here and there relieved by momentary rays of sunshine. Always in debt; always in danger; always pestered by lawyers and arrests. It has been with truth observed, that upon one half of Haydon’s income, many a better man than he had lived. In 1835 we find him lecturing at Mechanics’ Institutions in the provinces, which for a time was a pecuniary success. But he was too deeply involved in the expensive fashions and gaieties of May Fair; and again we find him in the King’s Bench. Three more years of fearful struggle brought him to the fearful tragedy which shocked the country on the 22nd of June, 1846. Having returned from an early walk, Haydon entered his painting-room, and wrote in his diary:
“God forgive me! Amen.
Finis
of
B. R. Haydon.
‘Stretch me no longer on the rough world.’—Lear.
End of twenty-sixth volume.”
“Before eleven,” says Tom Taylor, “the hand that wrote it was stiff and cold in self-inflicted death.”
INTRODUCTION TO FUSELI.
“Calling at Fuseli’s house,” says Haydon, “the door was opened by the maid. I followed her into a gallery or show-room, enough to frighten anybody at twilight. Galvanized devils; malicious witches, brewing their incantations; Satan bridging Chaos, and springing upwards, like a pyramid of fire; Lady Macbeth, Carlo and Francisco, Falstaff and Mrs. Quickly—humour, pathos, terror, blood and murder, met one at every look. I expected the floor to give way: I fancied Fuseli himself to be a giant. I heard his footsteps, and saw a little bony hand slide round the edge of the door, followed by a little white-headed, lean-faced man, in an old flannel dressing-gown, tied round the waist with a piece of rope, and upon his head the bottom of Mrs. Fuseli’s work-basket. ‘Well, well,’ thought I, ‘I am a match for you at any rate, if bewitching is tried;’ but all apprehension vanished, on his saying in the mildest and kindest way, ‘Well, Mr. Haydon, I have heard a great deal of you from Mr. Hoare. Where are your drawings?’ In a fright, I gave him the wrong book, with a sketch of some men pushing a cask into a grocer’s shop. Fuseli smiled, and said, ‘Well, de fellow does his business at least with energy!’ I was gratified at his being pleased in spite of my mistake.... He (Fuseli) was about five feet five inches in height, had a compact little form, stood firmly at his easel, painted with his left hand, never held his palette upon his thumb, but kept it upon his stone, and being very near-sighted, and too vain to wear glasses, used to dab his beastly brush into the oil, and sweeping round the palette in the dark, take up a great lump of white, red, or blue, as it might be, and plaster it over a shoulder or a face. Sometimes in his blindness he would make a hideous smear of Prussian blue on his flesh, and then perhaps, discovering his mistake, take a bit of red to darken it; and then, prying close in, turn round and say, ‘Ah, dat is a fine purple! It is really like Correggio;’ and then, all of a sudden, he would burst out with a quotation from Homer, Tasso, Dante, Ovid, Virgil, or perhaps the Niebelungen Lied, and thunder round with ‘Paint dat!’... I found him,” continues Haydon, “the most grotesque mixture of literature, art, scepticism, indelicacy, profanity and kindness: he put me in mind of Archiman, in Spenser. Weak minds he destroyed. They mistook his wit for reason, his indelicacy for breeding, his swearing for manliness, and his infidelity for strength of mind; but he was accomplished in elegant literature, and had the art of inspiring young minds with high and grand views.”
LONDON SMOKE.
Haydon observed to Fuseli: “So far from the smoke of London being offensive to me, it has always been to my imagination the sublime canopy that shrouds the city of the world. Drifted by the wind, or hanging in gloomy grandeur over the vastness of our Babylon, the sight of it always filled my mind with feelings of energy, such as no other spectacle could inspire.” “Be Gode,” added Fuseli, “it’s like the smoke of the Israelites making bricks.” “It is grander,” rejoined the other; “for it is the smoke of a people who would have made the Egyptians make bricks for them.”
HAYDON’S DESCRIPTION OF THE BRITISH SCHOOL
OF PAINTERS.
“Never were four men so essentially different as West, Fuseli, Flaxman, and Stothard. Fuseli’s was undoubtedly the mind of the largest range; West was an eminent macchinista of the second rank; Flaxman and Stothard were purer designers than either. Barry and Reynolds were before my time; but Johnson said, in Barry’s ‘Adelphi’ ‘there was a grasp of mind you found nowhere else,’ which was true. Though Fuseli had more imagination and conception than Reynolds, though West put things together quicker than either, though Flaxman and Stothard did what Reynolds could not do, and Hogarth invented a style never thought of before in the world, yet, as a great and practical artist, in which all the others were greatly defective, producing occasional fancy pictures of great beauty, and occasional desperate struggles in high art, with great faults, Reynolds is unquestionably the greatest artist of the British School, and the greatest artist in Europe since Rembrandt and Velasquez.”