The name of Benjamin Robert Haydon, a British painter, deservedly entitled to be called a great painter, but greater still on account of his misfortunes, is intimately associated with the King’s Bench prison. His pictures, mainly historical and Biblical, generally of vast size, fine in conception and admirably executed, never quite appealed to the public taste and in the end were but little appreciated.
Haydon’s personality gained him many enemies; he was conceited, self-opinionated, with an exaggerated idea of his own merits, and he very unwisely entered into conflict with the Royal Academy, the feud lasting to the end of his life. Yet he long found a few admiring patrons and the support and countenance of numbers of warm friends. He was on the most intimate terms with the leaders of light and learning of his day. Sir Walter Scott warmly appreciated him; Wordsworth addressed many sonnets to his genius; Keats and he were like brothers. He spent much of his spare time with Charles Lamb, and lived on equal terms with the most eminent members of his own profession, Sir David Wilkie, Northcote, Landseer, Canova and Chantrey. Some of the greatest personages in the land took him by the hand, gave him orders for pictures and welcomed him gladly to their houses. Sir Robert Peel was long his good friend and the Duke of Wellington encouraged him and wrote him many characteristic letters.
With all his undoubted talents, his unflagging industry and ceaseless powers for work, Haydon was cursed with one irremediable defect, an utter incapacity for managing his own affairs. He was no spendthrift or wastrel. He could have lived well within the income he earned, not a bad one in those days, if he had not steadfastly forestalled it and so reduced it sometimes by a half or a third. Very early in his career he got behind-hand in his payments; no doubt in the first instance by the unpunctuality of those who owed him money. He was continually driven to pay his way by borrowing at extravagant rates, by giving bills for sums far in excess of value received and by mortgaging his pictures before they were finished. His hand to mouth devices might give him immediate relief but it was by incurring future liabilities of a much more onerous kind. His embarrassments were intensified by the existing laws and the powers given to his creditors over his freedom and independence. He was essentially a good man struggling with adversity, whom Tennyson tells us, “is a sight for the gods,” and one’s heart bleeds for him under his constant sufferings as pathetically depicted in his diaries.
He was already famous and had painted some of his earliest and best pictures. The “Entry of Christ into Jerusalem” was finished, his “Lazarus Raised from the Dead” was well advanced, and he was little more than five and twenty years of age when he was arrested for debt. He writes, that after having passed through every species of want and difficulty often without a shilling, without ever being trusted, a man to whom he had paid three hundred pounds arrested him out of pique for the balance. His lawyers extricated him but within a year he enters in his diary, “I am without a shilling in the world and with a large picture before me not half done.” A month later he was arrested by his artists’ colourman with whom he had dealt for fifteen years. He again escaped, but as the months passed he was harassed with letters for money every hour with repeated threatenings of arrest staved off by friendly assistance from Canova, Sir Walter Scott and Mr. Coutts. Others, Lord Mulgrave, Sir Edward Codrington, Brougham, Barnes of the Times and Miss Mitford were all prompt and helpful. Yet the next year he dated an entry, “Well, I am in prison,” from the King’s Bench. He decided to go through the court and was discharged without opposition. He was free again and the future before him was clear. “He must live”—I am quoting Tom Taylor—“He must live first of all and if possible without repeating that untoward, that living by credit and borrowing on no better security than high hopes and honest intentions which had ended in the King’s Bench and insolvency.” Another year and the entry appears, “Passed in desponding on the future, not a shilling in the world.” Later on, “Obliged to pawn my other lay figure, the female, for five pounds,—cost me thirty.” On the 12th January, 1827, an execution was in the house and he was saved only by the prompt assistance of a friend, yet he was arrested and cleared by a public subscription, after spending a month in the prison. But this detention brought him a great opportunity; he saw the “Mock Election,” a scene which, he says, “contrasted as it was with sorrow and prison walls, beggars all description ... never was such an excellent burlesque.... I saw the whole from beginning to end. I was resolved to paint it for I thought it the finest subject for humour and pathos on earth ... day by day the subject continued in my mind and as soon as I was restored to my family and pursuits I returned to the prison and sketched all the heads of the leading actors. Began the picture directly and I finished it in four months.” This picture hung fire for a time, but finally George IV sent to say he wished to see it and at once bought it for five hundred guineas. It may now be seen in the Royal Galleries at Windsor Castle. The picture portrays a curious episode in contemporary prison life painted with great fidelity and deep appreciation of the contrasted humour and pathos of the scene. The principal personages are drawn to the life and from life, for the painter went again and again to the prison to find his models. Haydon’s own account brings the picture before us:
“In the centre is the High Sheriff with burlesque elegance of manner begging one of the candidates not to break the peace or be irritated at the success of his rival.... This intended member is dressed in green with an oil silk cap and a red bow, the colours of his party. The gentleman who actually filled this character is, I have heard, a man of considerable fortune in Ireland.... Opposite and attired in the quilt of his bed and in a yellow turban is the other member who actually sat in the House two years and who by experience in the finesse of elections was the moving spring in all the proceedings in this picture. There is the Lord Mayor with solemn gravity, holding a white wand with a blue and yellow bow and a sash of the same colours. He was a third candidate. Immediately below in a white jacket is the head poll clerk swearing in three burgesses before they are allowed to vote.... The first, a dandy of the very first fashion, just imprisoned, with a fifty-guinea pipe in his right hand, a diamond ring on his finger, dressed in a yellow silk dressing gown, velvet cap and red morocco slippers; on his left stands an exquisite, who has been imprisoned three years, smoking a three-penny cigar, with a hole at his elbow and his toes on the ground; and the third is one of those characters of middle age and careless dissipation visible in all scenes of this description, dressed in a blue jacket and green cap. There are several other groups. In one a man of family sits sipping his claret, and a soldier who distinguished himself in Spain, imprisoned in early life for running away with a ward in chancery. Embarrassment followed and nine years of confinement have rendered him reckless and melancholy. He has one of the most tremendous heads I ever saw, something between Byron and Bonaparte. In the picture I have made him sit at ease with a companion while champagne bottles, a dice box, dice, cards, a racket bat and ball upon the ground announce his present habits. Leaning on him, and half terrified at the mock threats of the little red-nosed head constable with a mace, is an interesting girl attached to him in his reverses, and over his head, clinging to the top of the pump, is an elector intoxicated and huzzaing.
“A third group is composed of a good family in affliction, the wife devoted, clinging to her husband; the eldest boy with the gaiety of a child is cheering the others; behind is the old nurse sobbing over the baby five weeks old; while the husband, virtuous and in trouble, is contemplating the merry electors with pity and pain. The father and mother are in mourning for the loss of their second boy.... The father’s hand holds a paper, and on it is written ‘debt £26.10., costs £157.10. Treachery, Squeeze & Co., Thieves Inn.’ ” Upon the whole description Haydon comments, “What a set of beings are assembled in that extraordinary place, that temple of debauchery.”
Another description given in Haydon’s diary reveals a more painful side of prison life. It is an account of a Sunday in the King’s Bench. “The day passed in all the buzz, blasphemy, hum, noise and confusion of a prison. Thoughtless creatures! My room was close to theirs. Such language! Such jokes! Good Heavens! I had read prayers to myself in the morning, and prayed with the utmost sincerity for my dearest Mary and children, and to hear those poor fellows, utterly indifferent as it were, was really distressing to one’s feelings. One of them had mixed up an enormous tumbler of mulled wine crusted with nutmeg and as it passed round some one halloed out, ‘Sacrament Sunday, gentlemen!’ Some roared with laughter, some affected to laugh and he who was drinking pretended to sneer; but he was awfully annoyed. And then there was a dead silence, as if the blasphemy had recalled them to their senses. After an occasional joke or so, one, with real feeling, began to hum the 100th Psalm, not in joke, but to expiate his previous conduct, for neither he nor any one laughed then, but seemed to think it too serious a subject.”
This was in 1830 and in that same year he records in his diary: “This perpetual pauperism will in the end destroy my mind. I look round for help with a feeling of despair that is quite dreadful. At this moment I have a sick house without a shilling for the common necessaries of life. This is no exaggeration.” The burden of his appeal to the Directors of the British Gallery or Institution for encouragement is couched in the same terms. He speaks of “his present struggling condition with eight children and nothing on earth left him in property but what he is clothed with, after twenty-six years of intense and ardent devotion to painting,” and was vouchsafed help to the amount of £50. Year after year he struggled with indomitable courage to keep the wolf from the door. He was never at any time able to cope with current expenses or to face ever pressing liabilities. He struck at new lines in art, tried portrait painting, produced pictures of famous men at great epochs in their lives, “Wellington on the Field of Waterloo,” “Napoleon Musing at St. Helena,” to be engraved for general sale. He gave public exhibitions of his own most popular works, canvassed on every side for new commissions, tried fresco painting and the production of cartoons. Only in one direction did he make money, by lecturing on art, for which he had a natural gift, and for a time, but only for a time, he drew crowded audiences. He earned bread thus, but no more, and his necessities caused never ending pressure, still relieved constantly by the aid of the pawnbroker, or the money lender at usurious rates. The sheriff’s officers again carried him off to “that blessed refuge for the miserable—the Bench,” which, as ever, was rendered hideous by the levity of the vicious and the thoughtless. “Gambling, swearing and drinking went on as usual,” he relates, “and last night when I was musing on life and death, the bloods and blackguards were singing duets outside my door at midnight.”
Haydon fought on to the last, but the end was very near when he speaks in 1842 of “thirty-eight years of bitter suffering, incessant industry, undaunted perseverance, four imprisonments, three ruins and five petitions to Parliament, never letting the subject of State support for national art rest.” He chafed, not without reason, that at a public inquiry then in progress, neither Chairman nor Committee, witnesses nor pupils gave any sign that they were conscious that such a creature as Haydon existed.
“After this,” says Taylor, “the clouds settled down upon him and grew darker and more dense every month of his few remaining years of life. It is painful to follow day by day his struggles with disappointment, despondency and embarrassment.” He was vexed and harassed more and more, misfortunes multiplied, no fresh venture prospered and his last, the exhibition of his own cartoons, was a dismal failure. No one came to see them, the receipts on Easter day were beggarly; he took little more than a pound, and next door thousands and thousands thronged to see Tom Thumb. The future had never looked so black; “the butcher, the baker, the tax collector, the landlord gave louder knocks than before.” At length, he says, he “came home in excruciating anxiety,” not able to raise the money for the rent of the Egyptian Hall where his cartoons were exhibited. Fresh executions were to be put in and he says, “I felt my heart sink, my brain confused, I foresaw my family’s misery and a prison!” The desperate struggle was nearly over; he held on with but small hope of deliverance and at last gave up in despair. He entered his painting room for the last time and there shot himself on the 22nd of June, 1846, “when temporarily of unsound mind” as the coroner’s inquest charitably decided.