Benjamin Robert Haydon

Benjamin Robert Haydon, by Unknown artist, circa 1820 -NPG 2172 - © National Portrait Gallery, London

© National Portrait Gallery, London

Regency Portraits Catalogue

Benjamin Robert Haydon

by Unknown artist
circa 1820
6 3/4 in. x 5 1/2 in. (171 mm x 140 mm)
NPG 2172

This portraitback to top

Haydon's eldest son, Frank Scott Haydon (an official in the Public Record Office) offered the mask to the NPG in 1880 as 'taken about 1820 ... the best likeness of him I have ever seen. It was given me some years since by Mr J Corbet Anderson, a pupil of his' (letter to Scharf 24 April 1880 in NPG archive). The offer was accompanied by a peremptory condition that all mention of his father's suicide should be suppressed on the tablets and in the catalogue. The Trustees found the condition unacceptable and this led to a violent Haydonish letter mainly about the family disapproval of the memoir by his younger brother, Frederick Wordsworth Haydon.
In a later more restrained letter he mentions 'a cast of my father's head taken after death - but unless under pressure of the strongest necessity, I should be most unwilling to show it. The differences between the mask in your charge & this cast are numerous & striking' (letter to Scharf 3 January 1881 in NPG archive). The Trustees declined but agreed to delete reference to the suicide on the Zornlin tablet (151st and 155th meetings, 11 May 1880, p 204 and 12 March 1881, p 234). The life-mask was later acquired by Henry Buxton Forman, the editor of Shelley and Keats, and given to the NPG by his son; the death-mask has disappeared.
Haydon was a keen collector of life-masks of his friends and celebrities, sometimes employing the plasterers Mazzoni and Sarti of Prince's Street who helped him with casts of the Elgin Marbles. The alarming process of making a life-mask, that of Francis Jeffrey, is graphically described in Haydon's Diary, 5 May 1821.

Physical descriptionback to top

Probably a cast of NPG 2802, excluding the neck and top of the head.

Provenanceback to top

Given by Vice-Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond KGB in 1927.


This extended catalogue entry is from the out-of-print National Portrait Gallery collection catalogue: Richard Walker, Regency Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, 1985, and is as published then. For the most up-to-date details on individual Collection works, we recommend reading the information provided in the Search the Collection results on this website in parallel with this text.

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