Description

Before the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846) committed suicide, he had left instructions that an account of his life should be published, using his autobiography up to 1820 and his letters and journals for the rest. The writer and dramatist Tom Taylor (1817-80) took on the editing, and the three-volume work was published in 1853. (The slightly enlarged second edition, also of 1853, is reissued here.) Haydon was a history painter at a time when that genre was perceived as the greatest form of the art, and his friends included Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Charles Lamb, Hazlitt and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. However, he was constantly in financial difficulties, and in later life a sense of failure seems to have turned into outright paranoia. Volume 2 uses Haydon's journals to continue the account to 1834. His two-volume Conversations and Table-Talk, edited by his son, is also reissued is this series.