In May 1804, at the age of 18, Benjamin Robert Haydon left his home in Plymouth and set off for London to become a great artist. His mother was distraught, his father furious, but there was no doubt in Haydon's mind either of his vocation or of his genius. He could have worked in his father's bookshop and inherited a secure, independent income but he didn't want to. So he was rude to the customers and finally, when one of them asked for a reduction on a Latin dictionary, he stormed out. Such was always to be Haydon's way. So began 'that species of misery', the 'ceaseless opposition' of temperament that was to dog and finally to destroy him. Tactlessness is scarcely a tragic flaw: Haydon was obsessed with the heroic in art, yet in life he was often closer to the comic, his flair for insulting the wrong person at the wrong moment costing him chance after chance, losing him friends, recognition and patronage. His career, which ended in suicide, was less a tragedy than a parable, a moral tale of what he himself described as 'the agony of ungratified ambition'.

LRB 22 February 2001 | PDF Download