Benjamin Robert Haydon1786-1846: Painter and Writer, Friend of Wordsworth and Keats - Taschenbuch

This book tells the story of Haydon, a man of talents, even genius, a man of vital temperament, gifted and cursed with independent taste. He painted so big that few could hang his paintings, and fewer buy them. He was rich, but more often poor; he had friends who were the greatest in the land; he was in gaol more than once as a debtor. In his own view - and in that of some others - he was among the great Spirits of the Age. He was a champion in admiring and wishing to preserve for this country the Elgin marbles; he was a reformer of the teaching of art. He quarrelled; he loved; he lived fully; he won some things, he lost disastrously. Haydon was a great diarist, an irrepressible correspondent, an incessant pamphleteer: he wrote in high, exciting language. He is an essential figure for understanding the art of the Romantic period, especially its pursuit of the heroic in the now lost art of History painting that he so ardently championed.