Benjamin Robert Haydon

Benjamin Robert Haydon, by Georgiana Zornlin, 1825 -NPG 510 - © National Portrait Gallery, London

© National Portrait Gallery, London

Regency Portraits Catalogue

Benjamin Robert Haydon

by Georgiana Zornlin
1825
27 in. x 22 1/2 in. (686 mm x 572 mm)
NPG 510

Inscriptionback to top

Inscribed and signed on back of stretcher: B.R. Haydon 1825/Georgiana Margaretta Zornlin.

This portraitback to top

According to the artist Georgiana Zornlin, a pupil of Haydon's, the portrait was painted in 1825. She had had regular instruction from him and 'it was painted under his especial superintendence … the hand was a portrait as well as the head … the colours were provided and mixed by Haydon' himself (letters from Miss Zornlin 20 and 21 September 1878 in NPG archive). Haydon's eldest son, Frank Scott Haydon, accepted it as representing his father but 'not by any means a good likeness; my father's features were clear-cut and his face full of power. It was never flabby, nor bilious, nor was it ever vulgar, though the lower part of the face was more coarsely moulded than the upper & the jaw very broad & firm' (letter to Scharf 24 April 1880 in NPG archive).
Aldous Huxley (Aldous Huxley's Introduction to Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1926) likens the Zornlin portrait to Mussolini, at that time very much part of the world scene. 'The vast and noble brow, enlarged and ennobled by incipient baldness beyond the limits of verisimilitude; those flashing eyes; that square strong jaw; that wide mouth with its full, floridly sculptured lips; that powerful neck - are not those Il Duce's very features? But Miss Zornlin was not a very good painter. A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face. Miss Zornlin's implications are entirely misleading, and if it were not for Haydon's own self-portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, and the drawing of him as a youth in the possession of Sir Robert Witt, we should never have guessed that this truculent dictator was the possessor of a very large, yet delicately modelled and somehow frail-looking aquiline nose, and a chin which, while not exactly weak, was not so formidably protuberant as one might have expected. It is as though Mussolini had been strangely blended with Cardinal Newman.' (Huxley op. cit., p v).

Physical descriptionback to top

Half-length to right, arms folded, spectacles in right hand, dark red coat, black waistcoat, white shirt; curly brown hair, grey eyes, pink complexion; part of the easel for a gigantic picture in right background.

Provenanceback to top

Given by Georgiana Margaretta Zornlin in 1878.

Exhibitionsback to top

'Sir George Beaumont and his Circle', Leicester, 1953 (17).


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.

View all known portraits for Benjamin Robert Haydon