fill her eye and slowly trickle down her cheek, and then she would
look almost indignant at her own weakness. My dear mother felt her
approaching end so clearly that she made every arrangement with
reference to her death. I went to Exeter to get her apartments ready
at the hotel the day before she left home. She had passed a great part
of her life with a brother (the prebend of Wells), who took care of a
Mr. Cross, a dumb miniature painter. Cross (who in early life had made
a fortune by his miniatures) loved my mother, and proposed to her, but
she, being at that time engaged to my father, refused him, and they had
never seen each other since. He retired from society, deeply affected
by his disappointment. The day after leaving Exeter we stopped at
Wells, as my mother wished to see my uncle once more.
“The meeting was very touching. As I left the room and crossed the
hall I met a tall, handsome old man; his eyes seemed to look me
through. Muttering hasty, unintelligible sounds he opened the door,
saw my mother, and rushed over to her, as if inspired of a sudden with
youthful vigour. Then, pressing her to his heart, he wept, uttering
sounds of joy not human. This was Cross. They had not met for thirty
years. We came so suddenly to my uncle’s they had never thought of
getting him out of the way. It seemed as if the great sympathizing
spirit once again brought them together before their souls took flight.
“He was in an agony of joy and pain, smoothing her hair, and pointing
first to her cheek and then to his own, as if to say, ‘How altered!’
The moment he darted his eyes upon my sister and me, he looked as if he
felt we were her children, but did not much notice us beyond this.
“My sister, hanging over my poor mother, wept painfully. She, Cross,
my uncle and aunt, were all sobbing and much touched; for my part, my
chest hove up and down as I struggled with emotions at this singular
and afflicting meeting. Disappointment in love, where the character is
amiable, gives a pathetic interest to woman or man. But how much more
than ordinary sympathy must he excite who, dumb by nature, can only
express his feelings by the lightenings of the eye! Thus had this man
been left for thirty years, brooding over affections wounded as for
the mere pleasure of torture. For many months after my mother married
he was frantic and ungovernable at her continued absence, and then
sank into sullen sourness. His relations and friends endeavoured to
explain to him the cause of her going away, but he was never satisfied,
and never believed them; now, when the recollection of her, young
and beautiful, might occasionally have soothed his imagination, she
suddenly bursts on him with two children, the offspring of her marriage
with his rival--and that so altered, bowed, and weakened as to root
out the association of her youthful beauty with the days of his happy
thoughts.
“There are moments of suffering or joy when all thought of human
frailties is swept away in the gush of sympathy. Such a moment was
this. His anger, his frantic indignation, and his sullen silence at her
long absence, all passed away before her worn and sickly face. He saw
her before him, broken and dying; he felt all his affection return,
and flinging himself forward on the table, he burst into a paroxysm of
tears as if his very heart-strings would crack. By degrees we calmed
him, for nature had been relieved by this agonizing grief, and they
parted in a few moments for the last time.”
Next day Haydon and his sister went on with their mother, but did not
reach London with her; she died at Salt Hill, in the inn.
Surely had B. R. but deigned to paint a picture of the old dumb
lover with arms outspread on the table, weeping--as he so touchingly
describes the scene, it would have appealed to the public. But no! the
scene was not heroic. Old Cross was not a classic figure. Haydon had
resolved to be a painter of heroic in art or be nothing.
The Royal Academy would have none of him, and he attacked it furiously
at point of the bayonet. That the Royal Academy hampered the progress
of Art, stifled genius, crushed out originality was true then as some
assert it is true now; but the Royal Academicians did not relish
being told these truths by one just growing to manhood; and it was
impolitic in Haydon to set those in arms against him who posed and
were regarded as authorities on Art. Nothing pleased him but vast
canvases. On 24 July, 1825, he refused a commission of five hundred
guineas from Sir John Broughton to paint a small picture of Edward the
Black Prince distinguishing an ancestor on the field of Poitiers, lest
it should interfere with his carrying out of one of his unsaleable
monstrous canvases. The pictures that sold were portraits. “My whole
soul and body raise the gorge at portrait,” he wrote in his diary.
When he was engaged to do a family piece, he says that it gave him a
nasty taste in his mouth. Yet, as his great subjects would not sell,
he was forced to paint portraits; and he writes, 24 July, 1824: “For
these two months, having at last devoted myself to portraits, I have
enjoyed tranquillity, luxury, quiet, and peace, and have maintained my
family with respectability.” And then he bursts forth into scorn and
loathing of the subject. Indeed, he says he gloried in doing portraits
badly, because it was unworthy of him and his high ideals. “I have an
exquisite gratification in painting portraits wretchedly.” 27 March,
1843: “The moment I touch a great canvas I think I see my Creator
smiling on all my efforts. The moment I do mean things for subsistence
I feel as if He had turned His back, and, what’s more, I believe it.”
21 January, 1842: “There is nothing like a large canvas. Let me be
penniless, helpless, hungry, thirsty, croaking or fierce, the blank,
even space of a large canvas restores me to happiness, to anticipations
of glory. My heart expands, and I stride my room like a Hercules.”
Borrow, in his _Lavengro_, has devoted a chapter to a visit to Haydon.
A commission had been given to the artist to paint the portrait of
the Mayor of Norwich. He was only reconciled to the idea when it was
suggested to him that he should represent the mayor as issuing from
under a Norman archway.
“The painter of the heroic resided a great way off, at the western end
of the town. We had some difficulty in obtaining admission to him; a
maidservant, who opened the door, eyeing us somewhat suspiciously. It
was not until my brother had said that he was a friend of the painter
that we were permitted to pass the threshold. At length we were shown
into the studio, where we found the painter, with an easel and brush,
standing before a huge canvas, on which he had lately commenced
painting a heroic picture. The painter might be about thirty-five years
old; he had a clever, intelligent countenance, with a sharp grey eye;
his hair was dark-brown, and cut _à la_ Raphael, that is, that there
was very little before and much behind; he did not wear a neckcloth,
but in its stead a black riband, so that his neck, which was rather
fine, was somewhat exposed; he had a broad, muscular breast, and I make
no doubt that he would have been a fine figure, but unfortunately his
legs and thighs were somewhat short.
“My brother gave him a brief account of his commission. At the mention
of the hundred pounds I observed the eyes of the painter to glisten.
‘Really,’ said he, ‘it was very kind to think of me. I am not very fond
of painting portraits; but a mayor is a mayor, and there is something
grand in the idea of the Norman arch. I’ll go; moreover, I am just at
this moment confoundedly in need of money, and when you knocked at the
door I thought it was some dun. I don’t know how it is, but in the
capital they have no taste for the heroic. They will scarce look at a
heroic picture.’
“Thereupon it was arranged between the painter and my brother that they
should depart [for Norwich] the next day but one; they then began
to talk of art. ‘I’ll stick to the heroic,’ said the painter; ‘I now
and then dabble in the comic, but what I do gives me no pleasure--the
comic is low; there is nothing like the heroic. I am engaged here on
a heroic picture,’ said he, pointing to the canvas; ‘the subject is
Pharaoh dismissing Moses from Egypt. That finished figure is Moses.’
The picture was not far advanced; as I gazed upon it, it appeared to
me that there was something defective--something unsatisfactory in the
figure.
“We presently afterwards departed. My brother talked much about the
painter. ‘He is a noble fellow,’ said my brother, ‘but, like many other
noble fellows, has a great many enemies; he is hated by his brethren of
the brush--but above all, the race of portrait painters detest him for
his heroic tendencies. It will be a kind of triumph to the last when
they hear he has condescended to paint a portrait; however, that Norman
arch will enable him to escape from their malice.... By the by, do you
not think that figure of Moses is somewhat short?’ And then it appeared
to me that I had thought the figure of Moses somewhat short, and I told
my brother so.
“On the morrow my brother departed with the painter for the old town,
and there the painter painted the mayor. The mayor was a mighty, portly
man, with a bull’s head, black hair, body like that of a dray-horse,
and legs and thighs corresponding--a man six foot high at the least. To
his bull’s head, black hair, and body, the painter had done justice;
there was one point, however, in which the portrait did not correspond
with the original--the legs were disproportionably short, the painter
having substituted his own legs for those of the mayor.
“Short legs in a heroic picture will never do; and, upon the whole,
I think the painter’s attempt at the heroic in painting the mayor of
the old town a decided failure. If I am now asked whether the picture
would have been a heroic one provided the painter had not substituted
his own legs for those of the mayor, I must say I am afraid not. I have
no idea of making heroic pictures out of English mayors, even with the
assistance of Norman arches; yet I am sure that capital pictures might
be made of English mayors, not issuing out of Norman arches, but rather
from the door of the Chequers, or the Brewers Three. The painter in
question had great comic power, which he scarcely ever cultivated; he
would fain be a Raphael, which he never could be, when he might have
been something quite as good--another Hogarth; the only comic piece
which he ever presented to the world being little inferior to the best
of that illustrious master.”
Borrow was wrong in saying that Haydon did only one comic piece; he did
three or four, of which presently.
On 10 October, 1821, Haydon married a widow with two children by the
first husband; and to the end he remained devotedly attached to his
dear Mary. She had a little money of her own.
He had got £3000 receipts by exhibition of his picture “Christ’s
Entry into Jerusalem,” but had to sell it, being short of money, for
£240; and he was forced to dispose of his “Raising of Lazarus” to
Binus, his upholsterer, to clear off a debt, for £300. He certainly
did make a good deal of money, but was always in debt, often without
a shilling in his pocket. His huge canvases did not sell. He says of
them, in 1826, when Reinagle questioned him about them, “Where is your
‘Solomon,’ Mr. Haydon?” “Hung up in a grocer’s shop.” “Where is your
‘Jerusalem’?” “In a wareroom in Holborn.” “Where is your ‘Lazarus’?”
“In an upholsterer’s shop in Mount Street.” “And your ‘Macbeth’?”
“In Chancery.” “Your ‘Pharaoh’?” “In an attic, pledged.” “And your
‘Crucifixion’?” “In a hayloft.” “And ‘Silenus’?” “Sold for half-price.”
But he was incapable of bending his proud spirit to accommodate his
style to the popular taste. He besieged the ministers, he pestered
great men to get the Government to encourage High Art. If noble patrons
would not buy heroic pictures on huge canvases, the State should do it
to adorn public buildings. He took pupils,[22] who paid large premiums,
and he got them to back his bills, and involved them in heavy outlay
to meet them, and then pupils shrank from coming near him. He pestered
the nobility, all wealthy men for loans, for grants, for pecuniary aid
to help him out of immediate difficulties. He was arrested again and
again, and sent to the King’s Bench, had to appear in the Insolvent
Debtors’ Court, had distraints levied on his pictures, his furniture,
his books. He went about lecturing on Art, and these lectures brought
him in a respectable revenue, but he was ever underwater. How he
squandered his money does not appear in his journals; but he certainly
did earn sufficient with his brush to have maintained himself and his
family in respectability had he known how to economize. He got into the
hands of moneylenders, and was squeezed. He met with generous aid from
numerous quarters, but was no sooner relieved of one pressing call than
he fell into fresh difficulties.
If he were taken up by a noble patron and invited to his table, he
offended him by contradiction and rudeness. “I do not think I am liked
in company, except by women,” he admits in his journal.
The comic painting alluded to by Borrow was thus originated whilst
Haydon was in the Debtors’ Prison at King’s Bench:--
“I was sitting in my own apartment, buried in my own reflexions,
melancholy, but not despairing, at the darkness of my prospects and the
unprotected condition of my wife and children, when a sudden tumultuous
and hearty laugh below brought me to the window.
“Before me were three men marching in solemn procession, the one in the
centre a tall young, reckless, bushy-headed, light-hearted Irishman,
with a rusty cocked-hat under his arm, a bunch of flowers in his bosom,
his curtain-rings round his neck for a gold chain, a mopstick for a
white wand, tipped with an empty strawberry-pottle, bows of ribbons on
his shoulders, and a great hole in his elbow; on his right was another
person in burlesque solemnity, with a sash and real white wand; two
others, fantastically dressed, came immediately behind, and the whole
followed by characters of all descriptions, some with flags, some with
staffs, and all in perfect merriment and mock gravity, adapted to some
masquerade. I asked what it meant, and was told it was a procession of
burgesses, headed by the Lord High Sheriff and Lord Mayor of the King’s
Bench Prison, going in state to open the poll, in order to elect two
members to protect their rights in the House of Commons. I returned to
my room, and laughed and wept by turns! Here were a set of creatures
who must have been in want and in sorrow, struggling (with a spiked
wall before their eyes) to bury remembrance in the humour of a farce.”
He painted the scene of the “Mock Election in Prison,” and sold it to
the King for £525, after having made £321 by it in exhibition. Then he
painted another comic picture, “Chairing the Member,” for which he got
£422, beside £168 by exhibition. A third humorous picture was “Punch
and Judy.”
But though he made money by these paintings in the style of Hogarth, he
hated doing them. His soul soared to High Art.
“At the table of Mr. Wyatt,” says the Rev. J. Richardson in his
_Recollections_ (London, 1856), I met the late Mr. Haydon, the
artist, with whom I had been previously acquainted. Haydon was
undoubtedly a man of considerable talent, but of insatiable vanity.
He had concentrated in his own estimation of his merits those atoms
of admiration that ought to have been diffused among the general
community, who were certainly somewhat slow in recognizing the claims
which he was continually urging; indeed, they were far too slow to
satisfy his craving for applause, and for a slice or two of that
solid pudding which many people value much more than empty praise.
The consequence was that he was continually indulging in querulous
complaint and bitter vituperation; everybody was rewarded except
himself; nobody but himself had any merit or capacity or feeling for
Art. All the world were fools; he was the little bit of leaven that
was to bring the solid lump into fermentation; the one wise man whose
presence rescued the mass of mankind from unqualified insignificance
and fatuity. This inordinate vanity overlaid the many good qualities
which he possessed, blinded his perspicuity, and perverted his
judgment.”
On 16 October, 1834, the Houses of Parliament were consumed by fire,
and Barry was entrusted with designs for the erection of a new palace,
which was begun in 1840. Now was the opportunity for which Haydon had
yearned. The new Houses of Parliament must receive decoration in
fresco. In 1842 a Fine Arts Commission issued a notice of conditions
for a cartoon competition. Haydon welcomed this with delight. Who but
he was competent to execute such great works? And he laboured hard at
the study of fresco and in the preparation of cartoons. But he was
disappointed at not being given the chief place, without question, in
the decoration of the Houses.
“After thirty-eight years of bitter suffering,” he wrote, “perpetual
struggle, incessant industry, undaunted perseverance, four
imprisonments, three ruins, and five petitions to the House--never
letting the subject of State support rest night or day, in prison or
out; turning everything before the public--the wants of his family, the
agonies of his wife, the oppression of the Academy, directing all to
the great cause [of High Art], it is curious to see that the man who
has got hold of the public heart, who is listened to and hailed by the
masses--it is curious, as a bit of human justice, to find chairman,
committee, witnesses, pupils, avoid throughout the whole inquiry any
thought, word, or deed which could convey to a foreign nation or a
native artist, a noble lord or an honourable member, that there was
such a creature as Haydon on the earth!”
The opening of the Cartoon Exhibition was fixed for 3 July, 1843.
Already, on 27 June, Haydon had received intelligence that his cartoons
had been rejected. It was a bitter blow. But he struggled on till
April, 1846, when he received another, that was final, and crushed his
spirits. His cartoons should be seen and appreciated by the public.
He hired a room in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, in which to exhibit
them, together with some of his historical paintings--“Aristides
Banished from Naples,” “Nero Playing upon his Harp whilst Rome was
Burning,” and some others. In the large front room of the Egyptian
Hall, General Tom Thumb was holding his levees, and a swarm of people
crowded to these, and very few looked in on Haydon’s exhibition.
In his diary he enters: “21 April. Tom Thumb had 12,000 people last
week. B. R. Haydon 133-1/2 (the 1/2 a little girl). Exquisite taste of
the English people!”
He closed his exhibition on 18 May, and had lost by it £111 8s. 10d. He
wrote: “I have not decayed, but the people have been corrupted. I am
the same, they are not.”
This was a wound so severe to his vanity that it never healed. He
abused the public, contrasting his own merits with those of his
diminutive rival, and mixing up the sublime with the ridiculous in such
a manner as to make his complaints the source of laughter rather than
of commiseration. He was at some moments in so excited a condition from
his own disappointment, contrasted with the success of the dwarf and
the showman, that he appeared to his friends to be almost insane.
On 22 June he wrote in his diary the lines from _Lear_:--
Stretch me no longer on this rough world.
This was written between half-past ten and a quarter to eleven o’clock
on that morning. He was in his studio. About a quarter to eleven
his wife and daughter heard the report of firearms, but took little
notice of it, as they supposed it to proceed from the troops then
exercising in the Park. Mrs. Haydon went out. Miss Haydon entered
the painting-room, and found her father stretched dead before the
easel on which stood his unfinished picture of “King Alfred and the
First English Jury”--his white hairs dabbled in blood, a half-open
razor smeared with blood at his side, near it a small pistol recently
discharged, in his throat a fearful gash, and a bullet-wound in his
skull. A portrait of his wife stood on a smaller easel facing his large
picture. On a table near was his diary open at the page of that last
entry, his watch, and a Prayer Book open at the Gospel for the Sixth
Sunday after the Epiphany, and his will.
The coroner’s jury found that the suicide was committed when Haydon
was in an unsound state of mind. In fact, he had been driven mad by
mortified vanity. His debts at his death amounted to about £3000. The
assets were inconsiderable. Liberal and immediate assistance and much
sympathy were extended to the bereaved widow and family.
Posterity has not seen occasion to reverse the judgment of his
contemporaries on Haydon’s paintings.
His engrossing love of art, with his consciousness of great powers,
and excessive self-esteem, made him a most enthusiastic devotee to
any work which he had on his easel, and enabled him to bear up long
against the thousand interruptions from embarrassed circumstances which
are detailed in his _Autobiography_. Whilst painting his “Maid of
Saragossa” he accidentally wounded his foot with a bayonet, but went on
with the picture, using his own blood as a pigment, till the surgeon
arrived.
Zeal, devotion, high thoughts, ability in composition, some power in
colouring, and correct anatomical drawing may and ought to be conceded
to Haydon. But he aimed at subjects beyond his power of execution, and
in all his High Art paintings there is a lack of refined feeling and
good taste. Thus, in the “Judgment of Solomon” the king is depicted
as treating the whole affair as a practical joke. Mr. Watts, the
artist, says: “The characteristics of Haydon’s art appear to me to be
great determination and power, knowledge and effrontery. His pictures
are himself, and fail as he failed. In Haydon’s work there is not
sufficient forgetfulness of self to disarm criticism of personality.
His pictures are themselves autobiographical notes of the most
interesting kind; but their want of beauty repels, and their want of
modesty exasperates. Perhaps their principal characteristic is want
of delicacy of perception and refinement of execution. His touch is
generally woolly, and his surface disagreeable.”
He was determined to force his idea of the Heroic in Art on a public
that had got beyond gods and goddesses and the heroes of the Greeks and
Romans. He would have done well at the Court of Louis XIV, but he was
out of date at the dawn of the naturalism of the nineteenth century.
The public, thought Haydon, were sick, and knew not what Art was. They
must be forced, scolded, lectured, rated to admire it. The last thing
that would occur to him would be to study the trend of public taste and
to adapt himself to it.
When drawing his cartoons for the Houses of Parliament, he would not
even consider what was fitting. Had he sent in his “Alfred and Trial by
Jury,” it might and probably would have been approved; but instead he
sent pictures from the Reign of Terror in France to represent Anarchy,
which was of all things unsuited for the new palace, that did not
desire scenes from French history, and those recent ones.
And his huge cartoons were a mistake. Epics are not for the masses,
and only great public buildings could contain these canvases. Public
bodies did not care to spend large sums upon pictures for town halls
and exchanges.
“What a game you have thrown away!” said a friend to Haydon one day;
and we must echo that opinion in considering the life before us. It was
a game utterly and irretrievably, through vanity and pig-headedness,
thrown away.
JOHN COOKE
By a public character in his way
You may find an anecdote of the day,
I wish every line to tell, and word I say.
Thus “Captain” John Cooke, the Exeter saddler, begins his pamphlet,
_Old England for Ever_, published by Curson, of Exeter, in 1819.