HAYDON, Benjamin Robert

(b. 1786 Plymouth, d. 1846 London)

English painter, who aspired to bring a new seriousness to British art through historical and religious work in the Grand Manner preached by Reynolds. His life was a story of bombastic frustration and intransigent opposition to the establishment (particularly the Royal Academy), fighting continuously for personal recognition and arguing for the social purpose of art.

As a painter, however, his talents fell far short of his ambitions, his multi-figure compositions degenerating into turgid melodrama. His great monument, rather, is the massive collection of autobiographical writings he left behind him (various editions have been published), which gives fascinating insights into the contemporary artistic scene and paints a vividly detailed picture of his disturbed mind and tragicomical life. He was closely linked with the Romantic movement in literature, particularly with William Wordsworth, who wrote a sonnet to him, and with John Keats, doing portraits of both of them (National Portrait Gallery, London), and but for his lack of talent he would exemplify all the traits traditionally ascribed to the Romantic concept of genius. In true Romantic fashion his death came by suicide.

Christ's Entry into Jerusalem

Haydon was impelled by strong personal faith to undertake his uncommissioned religious canvases. The years of labour he expended on them helped to ruin him. It was his aim to cast out doubt as well as win fame, and in Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, he addressed the issue of doubt directly, assembling past rationalists and sceptics like Voltaire and his own more devout friends like Wordsworth among the watching crowd. Their varied reactions to Christ’s appearance amount to a debate on faith.

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Wordsworth on Helvellyn

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was an English poet who with Samuel Taylor Coleridge launched the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads. His masterpiece is generally considered to be The Prelude, an autobiographical poem of his early years.

‘High is our calling, Friend! Creative Art’. Thus William Wordsworth, the supreme Romantic poet of nature, addressed Haydon in a sonnet in 1815. Haydon was to repay the compliment later, by painting one of the most memorable portraits of Romantic inspiration, showing Wordsworth musing among the clouds, high up on the Lake District peak of Helvellyn

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