Some years before the Elgin marbles were put on display in the British Museum, rising artist Benjamin Haydon got a sneak preview.
In 1808, young Benjamin Haydon was an up-and-coming painter with a passion for lifelike figures. He had spent long hours sprawled on the floor painstakingly copying anatomical drawings instead of courting well-to-do patrons, and his father had declared him mad. Haydon called himself only exasperated: his attempts to paint Roman hero Dentatus were going badly.
Artist Benjamin Robert Haydon laments the passing of Lord Egremont, whose generosity and good judgment reached far beyond his support for struggling artists.
George Wyndham (1751-1837), 3rd Earl of Egremont, was one of Georgian England’s wealthiest and most philanthropic of men, a patron of the arts and of industry, a responsible farmer and animal breeder. After the Earl died on November 11th, 1837, artist Benjamin Robert Haydon turned to his diary and penned a glowing tribute to a man who had given support to him and many like him in lavish measure.
Amid all the confusion of the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington spotted a man in civilian clothes riding busily around on a stocky horse.
Benjamin Haydon was a respected nineteenth-century English artist and teacher, but his career was a constant struggle, blighted by debt and (in his eyes) betrayal. He died at his own hand in 1846. Haydon left behind a diary in which he recorded an anecdote set against the background of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, on the authority of the Duke of Wellington himself.