Benjamin Robert Haydon

The history painter Haydon was intensely ambitious and opinionated. He studied under the artist Fuseli. He was an ardent campaigner for public patronage of the arts and for the purchase of the Elgin Marbles in 1816. A friend of Wordsworth, Keats and Lamb, Haydon was convinced of his own towering genius, but apart from a couple of successes, his career as a history painter was ultimately a failure. Unwilling to compromise his ideals, he was endlessly in debt and was driven to suicide in 1846.

Text © National Portrait Gallery, London