Our Oct ’23 meeting was a presentation on the artist and diarist Benjamin Haydon (1786-1846) by Karin Fernald. The talk started off in dramatic fashion with a recounting of his death by suicide (pistol) at the age of 60. He was in debt to his landlord and had several previous arrests and had spent time in the debtors’ prison. He studied drawing and anatomy and was an Associate of the Royal Academy where he had attended Life classes. He had a somewhat quarrelsome relationship with the R. A. about the hanging of his paintings. He made drawings from the Elgin Marbles of statues and horses heads. An 1842 portrait he did of Wordsworth hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. In his diaries he recorded the encounters he had with the artists of the day, such as Fuseli (1780’s) and J. Northcote and friendships with John Keats and David Wilkie, a Scottish artist. He was outspoken and opinionated in his diaries. On a Paris trip with Wilkie he made a drawing of the tomb of Abelard and Heloise. He disliked the idea of painting to please the rich and famous and preferred to follow his own inclinations to paint large, historical canvasses. The most well known of these are Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem and Resurrection of Lazarus. He painted a portrait of the Duke of Wellington and lectured up and down the country to Mechanics institutes to stimulate an interest in the arts. He left his diaries to Elizabeth Barrett who returned them to his wife Mary. They were published after his death. Karin showed a number of illuminating slides portraying Haydon, his work and his friends. The overall impression left by this talk was of an artist passionate about his work, lively, opinionated and prolific in his diary writing (30 volumes) and committed to encouraging patronage and interest in the arts.
Lois Coulthart