A Genius for Failure: The Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon

by Paul O'Keeffe

A vivid and compelling biography of Benjamin Robert Haydon—historical painter, polemicist, diarist, friend of the famous, and genius  Haydon's first attempt at suicide ended when the low caliber bullet fired from his pistol fractured his skull but failed to penetrate his brain. His second attempt also a deep slash across his throat left a large pool of blood at the entrance to his studio, but he was still able to reach his easel on the opposite side of the room. Only his third attempt, another cut to the throat which sprayed blood across his unfinished canvas, was successful. He died face-down before the bespattered "Alfred and the First British Jury," his final bid "to improve the taste of the English people" through the High Art of historical painting. Such intensity, struggle and near-comic inability to succeed encapsulate Haydon's career. Thirty years before his death his huge, iconic paintings had made him the toast of early 19th-century London, drawing paying crowds to the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly for months and leading to nationwide tours. However, his attempt to repeat such success three months before his death was to destroy barely a soul turned up, leaving the desperate painter alone, humiliated, and facing financial ruin. In "A Genius for Failure" Paul O'Keeffe makes clear that the real tragedy of Haydon lay in the extent to which his failures were unwittingly engineered by his own actions - his refusal to resort to the painting of fashionable portraits, for example, and his self-destructively acrimonious relationship with the RA. The company he kept - Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, among many others - and the momentous events he lived through - The Battle of Waterloo, the Coronation of George IV, and the passing of the first Parliamentary Reform Bill - make "A Genius for Failure" not only the definitive biography of this fascinating and tragic painter, but a stirring portrayal of an age.

568 pages, Hardcover

First published November 24, 2006

Reviews

[Laura McNeal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Benjamin Haydon breaks my heart to smithereens, and the credit goes to Paul O’Keefe, who tracked down every surviving painting in every obscure hall and basement (the better to prove that what we fear is true—fate was cruel to Haydon in the future as well as the past ) and read, it would seem, every pained, overwrought word of the many thousands that Haydon wrote about art, debt, love, bitterness, failure, ambition, and faith. To be loved enough (pitied enough?) by a talented, tireless biographer is to achieve some measure of what Haydon sought in his lifetime, surely, and yet there is something so deep and dark and lost about Haydon’s life, and the life of his children and wife, that I feel both exhausted and in need of some further spell, some gentler, less-true story that would mitigate their suffering, somehow, because although it was mostly caused by Haydon himself, it was also caused by whatever made Haydon Haydon, and whatever makes us us.