Haydon, Benjamin Robert | Roger J. Porter (essay date 1993)
Roger J. Porter (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: Porter, Roger J. “‘In me the solitary sublimity’: Posturing and the Collapse of Romantic Will in Benjamin Robert Haydon.” In The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, edited by Robert Folkenflik, pp. 168-87. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993.
[In the following essay, Porter attempts to pinpoint the reason why Haydon felt the intense need to chronicle his life in his autobiography and in his journals.]
On June 22, 1846, moments before he committed a kind of double suicide by shooting himself and slashing his throat, Benjamin Robert Haydon, historical painter, would-be savior of British art, and friend to both generations of romantic writers, wrote the final words in the diary he had kept for 38 of his 60 years: “‘Stretch me no longer on this tough World’—Lear.”1 With a symmetrical gesture he could hardly have been...
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