Benjamin Robert Haydon - These are the writings of a painter who was so bad at art, and yet was one of the greatest prose writers of the nineteenth century. He completely mistook his vocation and wrote these utterly astonishing diaries in which all sorts of things crop up

Benjamin Robert Haydon, Neglected Genius: The Diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1808-1846, Faber & Faber, 2012.


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The journal of Benjamin Haydon was, Max Beerbohm reported to Siegfried Sassoon, the best diary Beerbohm had ever read. Harold Acton declared Haydon 'a more exciting figure than Ruskin.' H.H. Asquith compared him favourably with Rousseau, while Aldous Huxley declared that 'Never was anyone more clearly cut out to be an author.'
Today Haydon's portraits and monumental historical paintings hang in almost all Britain's major collections. However in his own time (1786-1846) his reputation was less secure. Although an intimate of Wordsworth and Walter Scott, on friendly terms with lords and politicians, Haydon was also well acquainted with debtor's prison. Still he remained throughout a witty, brilliant diarist, vividly evidenced by this volume, expertly edited by John Jolliffe, which gathers opinions on everything from the Elgin Marbles and Turner's landscapes to Napoleon's digestion and Queen Victoria's complexion.




Andrew Graham-Dixon on His Favourite Art Books:

Your last book is The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon. Who was Benjamin Haydon, and why are his diaries worth reading?

These are the writings of a painter who was so bad at art, and yet was one of the greatest prose writers of the nineteenth century. He completely mistook his vocation and wrote these utterly astonishing diaries in which all sorts of things crop up.

There’s one entry where he’s at dinner with Wordsworth and Charles Lamb while Charles Lamb’s income tax inspector comes around. He writes this brilliant account of Wordsworth and all these other figures from the Romantic period as you’ve never seen them before, just taking the piss out of this poor man from the Inland Revenue. It’s brilliantly observed, coruscating, fantastic prose. It’s scintillating stuff, and there’s three thousand pages of it. The diaries are not as well-known as they should be, but they’re right up there with the letters of Byron.

In another entry, with Henry Fuseli, a Swiss professor of painting at the Royal Academy, Haydon is going round this weird shed in Hyde Park full of sculptures that everybody is saying are not very good. ‘This bloke Lord Elgin got them from somewhere; he says they’re from the Parthenon but we don’t think they can really be by Phidias’. Haydon goes, ‘No, they really are by Phidias’. And he borrows the bloody things! He takes them off to places like Manchester and puts all these nude figures from the Elgin Marbles on the stage, and then gets a bunch of young men and women in the first flush of sexual maturity to take all of their kit off and get on the stage. He demonstrates, pointing to the body of the naked woman to the sculpture, back to the naked woman going: look at how he rendered this sinew, or this joint.

Haydon was living in a transitional period as regards patronage of the arts, but as you say, he’s also concerned with educating the public about art.

He’s the child of this disaffected Enlightenment strain of thinking about art that develops in England from about 1760 onwards. He was one in a line of British artists who felt this great resentment profoundly towards the very narrow field of possibilities given to artists by the patronage of the English aristocracy and monarchy. This totally curtailed them to paint my lord’s wife, his horse, his dog, and his estate. It’s implicit in some of Joshua Reynolds’ discourses on art where he understands that it’s the Reformation that has caused this essential problem in British culture. The Protestant Reformation makes the depiction of religion pictures illegal and therefore, at a stroke, cuts off ninety-nine per cent of the significant patronage for the arts in this country, from which art doesn’t recover until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Henry Fuseli had argued that the terrible problem with art in our culture is that it’s all for the private sphere. It’s all portraits, it’s all pictures of horses, it’s all done for private means. There’s no grand public art in Britain, nothing to compare with the Parthenon or the Sistine Chapel. That kind of grand public statement doesn’t exist. Haydon is directly exposed to this and he takes it on. In a way, in a different sense, it’s what’s behind the pre-Raphaelites and Ruskin: this idea that art should be socially responsible and should connect to the wider issues of the time, rather than merely depicting someone’s prized possessions. So, Haydon is part of a very significant cultural moment.

And Haydon’s own paintings?

He was an extraordinary character, driven by this massive ambition to paint great history paintings. Haydon would paint these huge depictions of subjects like, from ancient Roman myth, Marcus Curtius leaping into the gulf. There’s an enormous one—it might be the largest painting in British history—which is owned by the Tate, and I think it still languishes unrestored in the Vauxhall Stores. I can’t remember the subject of it.

But he’s astonishingly bad at painting. He’s probably the worst painter of all of history. He always models the hero in his painting on himself —it’s always a self-portrait— as in Caravaggio, except, unfortunately, Benjamin Robert Haydon looked exactly like Danny DeVito. If you imagine Danny DeVito as Hercules, that’s what you get. The problem is compounded by the fact that he has really really weird theories and almost no gift for drawing or painting. He says, ‘Oh dear, I’ve made Christ in my picture Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem look about sixty. But I’ve got this brilliant idea: I’ll make everyone else in the painting look ninety, and then he will look younger’. Or he’d make a painting far too red, but then he worked out that if he painted everything else even more red, then it would look normal. And his eyesight was so bad that, at one point, he was wearing thirteen pairs of glasses, one on top of the other, in order to peer into the abyss of whatever latest botch of a painting he was working on.

Yet, he had a compelling, astonishing personality. He would manage to borrow £200,000 from somebody that he’d manage to persuade he was a genius. He’d do bugger all for about five years, then pull out the stops and produce some huge painting and exhibit it somewhere like Bullock’s Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. With luck, a hundred thousand Londoners would see it, each paying sixpence, and he’d be able to pay his debtors back. So, he was constantly saving himself.

As well as the humorous anecdotes and exceptional prose, his diaries also show that Haydon was a man that suffered immensely.

His personal life was absolutely tragic. He had five children, all of whom died of tuberculosis before they were six. One after another, his “little darlings”, as he called them, all died. And it was entirely because, as modern medicine tells us, he or his wife must have employed a tubercular wet-nurse who was giving the tuberculosis to each child that she breastfed. So, all of these terrible tragedies were happening and in the meanwhile he’s keeping this astonishing diary. This is in itself tragic because it’s so beautifully and poignantly written about his desires, his ambitions, about what’s wrong with British taste, about what happens at Wordsworth’s house when he goes around there, and so on.

This is the tragedy: he should have been a writer. He could have written great books, but he didn’t. He completely mistook his vocation; he thought he had to be a painter. And he constantly has these terrible things happen to him. After the Houses of Parliament burn down in 1834, it was Haydon who persuaded those responsible for building the new houses of parliament that they should include a number of huge canvases depicting scenes of British history, as they do. But guess who, having persuaded them to do all this, was never asked to paint one of those pictures: Benjamin Robert Haydon. He never got one of those commissions.

The last pages of the diary are just utterly heart-breaking. All of his children are dead, and he’s not been given the commission to paint any of the pictures in the Houses of Parliament. To cap it all, what happens with his great rescue picture that is going to save him again from financial ruin? He writes in the ledger that a character called Tom Thumb, a man who’s only one foot six high has arrived and he’s booked the next room in Bullock’s Egyptian Hall. The result of today’s visits: 96,000 visitors to Tom Thumb, visitors to Benjamin Robert Haydon’s great painting: three. And then he writes, “stretch me no more on the rack of this world.” At this point, he shot himself in his studio. There’s blood on his last painting. But he shot himself badly and didn’t manage to die. It took him eight hours to crawl down the stairs of his own house to get into the kitchen to get a knife where he cut his throat. That was the end of Benjamin Robert Haydon. But that’s all in the footnotes, explained in my edition by Willard Bissell Pope.

Haydon was just larger than life. I’ve always wanted to make a film about him. A lot of his paintings are in surprising places, like Plymouth Library, so, you can find them. Most of them, as I say, give you this vision of Danny DeVito doing improbable things. There’s great potential for an entertaining and interesting film, but I’ve never managed to get anyone to commission it so far. But I live in hope.

Interview by Charles J. Styles

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/favourite-art-books-andrew-graham-dixon/

Benjamin Robert Haydon (; 26 January 1786 – 22 June 1846) was a British painter who specialised in grand historical pictures, although he also painted a few contemporary subjects and portraits. His commercial success was damaged by his often tactless dealings with patrons, and by the enormous scale on which he preferred to work. He was troubled by financial problems throughout his life, which led to several periods of imprisonment for debt. He committed suicide in 1846.
He gave lectures on art, and kept extensive diaries that were published after his death.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/benjamin-robert-haydon-243



http://www.avictorian.com/Haydon_Benjamin.html