The original 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.
John Borrow described Robert Hawkes to his brother as a person of many qualifications:
—big and portly, with a voice like Boanerges; a religious man, the possessor of an immense pew; loyal, so much so that I once heard him say that he would at any time go three miles to hear any one sing 'God save the King'; moreover, a giver of excellent dinners. Such is our present mayor, who, owing to his loyalty, his religion, and a little, perhaps, to his dinners, is a mighty favourite.
Haydon, who makes no mention of the Borrows in his Correspondence or Autobiography, although there is one letter of George Borrow's to him in the latter work, had been in jail for debt three years prior to the visit of the Borrows. He was then at work on his greatest success in 'the heroic'—The Raising of Lazarus, a canvas nineteen feet long by fifteen high. The debt was one to house decorators, for the artist had ever large ideas. The bailiff, he tells us,[17] was so agitated at the sight of the painting of Lazarus in the studio that he cried out, 'Oh, my God! Sir, I won't arrest you. Give me your word to meet me at twelve at the attorney's, and I'll take it.' In 1821 Haydon married, and a little later we find him again 'without a single shilling in the world—with a large picture before me not half done.' In April 1822 he is arrested at the instance of his colourman, 'with whom I had dealt for fifteen years,' and in November of the same year he is arrested again at the instance of 'a miserable apothecary.' In April 1823 we find him in the King's Bench Prison, from which he was released in July. The Raising of Lazarus meanwhile had gone to pay his upholsterer £300, and his Christ's Entry into Jerusalem had been sold for £240, although it had brought him £3000 in receipts at exhibitions. Clearly heroic pictures did not pay, and Haydon here took up 'the torment of portrait-painting' as he called it.
ROBERT HAWKES, MAYOR OF NORWICH in 1824.
From the painting by Benjamin Haydon in St. Andrew's Hall, Norwich. This portrait has its association with Borrow in that his brother John was sent to London to request Haydon to paint it, and Borrow describes the picture in Lavengro.
'Can you wonder,' he wrote in July 1825, 'that I nauseate portraits, except portraits of clever people. I feel quite convinced that every portrait-painter, if there be purgatory, will leap at once to heaven, without this previous purification.'
Perhaps it was Mayor Hawkes who helped to inspire this feeling.[18] Yet the hundred pounds that John Borrow was able to procure must have been a godsend, for shortly before this we find him writing in his diary of the desperation that caused him to sell his books. 'Books that had cost me £20 I got only £3 for. But it was better than starvation.' Indeed it was in April of this year that the very baker was 'insolent,' and so in May 1824, as we learn from Tom Taylor's Life, he produced 'a full-length portrait of Mr. Hawkes, a late Mayor of Norwich, painted for St. Andrew's Hall in that city.' But I must leave Haydon's troubled career, which closes so far as the two brothers are concerned with a letter from George to Haydon written the following year from 26 Bryanston Street, Portman Square: