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Introduction
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.
JUST in this critical agony of anxiety how to do what I felt I wanted, and when I had been rubbing out and painting in again all the morning, Wilkie called. My hero was done,* though anything but well done, and Wilkie proposed that we should go and see the Elgin Marbles as he had an order.* I agreed, dressed, and away we went to Park Lane. I had no more notion of what I was to see than of anything I had never heard of, and walked in with the utmost nonchalance. [...]
To Park Lane then we went, and after passing through the hall and thence into an open yard, entered a damp dirty pent-house where lay the marbles ranged within sight and reach. The first thing I fixed my eyes on was the wrist of a figure in one of the female groups, in which were visible, though in a feminine form, the radius and ulna. I was astonished, for I had never seen them hinted at in any female wrist in the antique. I darted my eye to the elbow, and saw the outer condyle visibly allecting the shape as in nature. I saw that the arm was in repose and the soft parts in relaxation. That combination of nature and idea which I had felt was so much wanting for high art was here displayed to mid-day conviction.
My heart beat! If I had seen nothing else I had beheld sufficient to keep me to nature for the rest of my life.
* That is, the painting of Dentatus on which Haydon was working at the time. Manius Curius Dentatus (?-270 BC) was a Roman general admired for his incorruptibility, as well as his military triumphs against the Samnites, the Sabines and the Greek king Pyrrhus. He was known as Dentatus because rumour had it that he was born already teething.
* The Elgin Marbles are (for the most part) fragments of the Parthenon, a temple in Athens dedicated to the goddess Athene, and built in 447-438 BC under the direction of the great sculptor Phidias. The fragments were brought to England by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, ambassador to the Ottoman Empire — at that time, Greece was still a Turkish possession. By 1808, when Haydon saw them, the collection was not yet complete; shipments ceased in 1812. Lord Elgin kept the collection private, with showings such as this, until 1816, when he sold the marbles to the British Government for £35,000. According to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, that would have been about £2.8m in 2024. Even so, it was barely half what Lord Elgin had spent in acquiring them.
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