Benjamin Robert Haydon (Plymouth 1786-1846 London) Eighty-seven portrait drawings for 'The Reform Banquet' including: HRH Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex K.G. (1773-1843), 6th son of King George III; John Charles, Viscount Althorp, later 3rd Earl Spencer (1782-1845) (illustrated 'c'), Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons; Thomas Attwood, M.P. for Birmingham; George Eden, 2nd Lord Auckland, afterwards 1st Earl of Auckland (1784-1849); Francis Russell, later 7th Duke of Bedford; Sir George Birbeck; John Blackett; Sir John Bowring; Henry, 1st Lord Brougham and Vaux (1778-1868), Lord High Chancellor; Edward George Earle Lytton-Bulwer, 1st Lord Lytton (1803-1873), M.P. for St Ives; Sir Francis Burdett, 5th Bt. (1770-1844) (illustrated 'e'), M.P. for Westminster; Hon. George Byng (1764-1847), M.P. for Middlesex; George Stevens Byng, 2nd Earl of Strafford (1806-1886), M.P. for Milborne Port; Charles Calvert, M.P. for Southwark; John Campbell, Solicitor General; William Cavendish, afterwards 7th Duke of Devonshire K.G. (illustrated 'i'), M.P. for Derbyshire; Lord Henry John Spencer-Churchill (1797-1840), 4th son of the 5th Duke of Marlborough; William Henry, 1st Duke of Cleveland K.G. (1766-1842); Sir Augustus Clifford, 1st Bt. (1788-1877) (illustrated 'j'), Usher of the Black Rod; Thomas William, 1st Earl of Leicester, (1754-1842), M.P. for Norfolk; Thomas Brand, 20th Lord Dacre (illustrated 'k'); William Spencer Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire K.G. (1790-1858); John William, 4th Earl of Bessborough (1781-1847); Tom Duncombe, M.P. for Stratford; Hon. John Charles Dundas (1808-1866), 4th son of the 1st Earl of Zetland; Hugh Fortescue, later 2nd Earl Fortescue K.G. (1788-1861), (illustrated 'h'), M.P. for Devonshire; Edward Ellice (1783-1863) (illustrated 'd'), Joint Secretary to the Treasury 1830-1832, Secretary for War 1833-1854, M.P. for Coventry; George, 5th Earl of Essex (1757- 1839); Sir Ronald Crauford Ferguson G.C.B. (1773-1841), M.P. for Nottingham; Robert Cutlar Fergusson (1769-1838), Judge Advocate General 1834, M.P. for Kirkcudbright; Edward Fletcher, Chairman; Alexander Galloway; Charles Alexander Gore, 10th Duke of Hamilton (1811-1897); Sir James Robert George Graham, 1st Bt. (1792-1861), First Lord of the Admiralty; Charles Grant, Lord Glenelg (1778-1866), President of the Board of Control, M.P. for Inverness; Charles, 2nd Earl Grey K.G. (1764-1845) (illustrated 'a'), First Lord of the Treasury; Colonel the Hon. Charles Grey (1804-1870), M.P. for Wycombe; Thomas, 2nd Marquess of Headfort, K.P. (1787-1870); Lord Marcus Hill; Mr Hill, M.P. for Richmond; Sir John Cam Hobhouse, Lord Broughton (1786-1869), Secretary at War, M.P. for Westminster; Henry George, later 3rd Earl Grey K.G. (1802-1894), M.P. for Northumberland; Joseph Hume, M.P. for Middlesex; Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), M.P. for Dublin; Francis, Lord Jeffrey (1773-1850), Lord Advocate, M.P. for Malton and Edinburgh; Sir John Key; William, 8th Lord King, afterwards 1st Earl of Lovelace (1805-1893); Hon. George Lamb (1784-1834), M.P for Dungarvan, Under Secretary for the Home Department; Henry, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne (1780-1863), Lord President of the Council; Charles Shaw Lefevre, 1st Viscount Eversley (1794-1888), M.P. for Hampshire 1839-1857, Speaker of the House of Commons; William Henry, 3rd Baron Lyttleton (1782-1837); Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800-1859), Secretary to the Board of Control, M.P. for Calne; W. Mackenzie, M.P.; William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne (1779-1848) (illustrated 'b'), Secretary of State; George, 6th Earl of Carlisle, K.G. (1773-1848), M.P. for Yorkshire; George, 2nd Lord Nugent (1789-1850); Henry John, 3rd Viscount Palmerston K.G. (1748-1865), Foreign Secretary; Charles Pearson; Edward Pendarves (1775-1853), M.P. for West Cornwall; William Conyngham, 1st Lord Plunkett (1765-1854), Lord Chancellor of Ireland; William Stephen Poyntz (1770-1840) (illustrated 'g'), M.P. for Ashburton; John Charles Prior, Common Council; Thomas Spring, 1st Lord Monteagle, (1790-1866), Secretary of the Treasury, M.P. for Limerick 1820-1832, M.P. for Cambridge Borough 1832-1839; Charles, 5th Duke of Richmond K.G. (1791-1860) (illustrated 'f'), Postmaster General; Frederick John, 1st Earl of Ripon (1782-1859), Secretary of State for War and the Colonies; Lord John Russell, 1st Earl Russell (1792-1878), M.P. for Tavistock and South Devon, Paymaster General; Gregory William, 14th Lord Saye and Sele (1769-1844); Sir John Saunders Sebright, 7th Bt. (1767-1846), M.P. for Hertfordshire (1807-1835); Robert Vernon Smith, 1st Lord Lyveden (1800-1873), a Lord of the Treasury, M.P. for Northampton; Edward Adolphus, 11th Duke of Somerset K.G. (1775-1855); Captain the Hon. Frederick Spencer, afterwards 4th Earl Spencer K.G. (1798-1857), M.P. for Worcestershire; Edward Geoffrey, 14th Earl of Derby K.G. (1799-1869), Secretary for Ireland and Colonial Secretary; Francis, 7th Duke of Bedford K.G. (1788-1861), M.P. for Bedfordshire; Stewart Mackenzie; John Thelwall; Alderman Waithman [?]; Alderman Venables; George John, 5th Lord Vernon (1803-1866), M.P. for Derbyshire; Henry Worthington, M.P. for Bridport; Charles Wood, 1st Viscount Halifax (1800-1885), M.P. for Wareham, Joint Secretary of the Treasury; Hon. Matthew Wood, 1st Bt., M.P. for London; Charles Callis, Lord Western (1767-1844), M.P. for Essex; Richard, 1st Marquess of Westminster (1767-1845); Robert Wheeler, Mayor of Wycombe; Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846), a self-portrait of the artist four signed, two signed with initials; all signed by the sitters, twelve with cut signatures, four with accompanying autograph letters signed and laid down facing the portraits; some dated, variously between '11 Feb 1832-31 May 1834' and some with further inscriptions of the names and titles of the sitters and extracts from Haydon's diary, including a transcription of the letter from Viscount Althorp to his father Earl Spencer regarding the purchase of drawings dated 8 August 1833 black and white chalk on buff paper, laid down on the pages of the album 21¼ x 16¼ in. (54 x 41.3 cm.); and slightly smaller; with a related collection of sixty-seven autograph letters, altogether 144 pages, 4to and 8vo), Benjamin Robert Haydon (forty-four), George John, 2nd Earl Spencer (two), Spencer's man of business George Appleyard (eight), and others, 7 August 1833 - 2 June 1834, building up a full account of the negotiations over the purchase of the drawings 'Lord Grey ... has said as he will have the Picture he will give me leave to dispose of the drawings' and again on 10 August 'I shall be delighted if the drawings go to your Lordship', the price being 200 guineas and an additional 60 guineas for framing them, 'It is no exaggeration to say they are cheap. I assure your Lordship I am not money-loving' and the conditions under which it was carried through, including Haydon's debts 'as the pecuniary difficulties of Mr Haydon are a matter of notoriety' and Haydon's instructions on the care and presentation of the drawings 'take each drawing by the two top corners and then allow noone else to handle them and then lay them carefully down without least rubbing' (illustrated), hinged into the album along the inner edge; and an engraving (illustrated) and key of the sitters in the painting; and a typed receipt for the binding dated 13 October 1860; the albums 25¾ x 21 x 2 in. (55.3 x 53.3 x 5 cm.) in 19th century English half tan Morocco, gilt edges, blue silk covers both stamped, centre, with the coat of arms of the Spencer family, spine titled in gilt, bookplate of John Poyntz Spencer, 5th Earl Spencer laid down on the inside cover and printed Althorp library label upper cover both volumes with number 22370 above, extremities rubbed (2)
London, Victoria & Albert Museum, Treasures from Althorp, 1970.
Literature
Treasures from Althorp, exhib. cat., London, 1970, M16, illustrated.
Provenance
John Charles, Viscount Althorp, later 3rd Earl Spencer (1782-1845), 1834 and by descent in the family.
Notes
No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis. Please note Payments and Collections will be unavailable on Monday 12th July 2010 due to a major update to the Client Accounting IT system. For further details please call +44 (0) 20 7839 9060 or e-mail info@christies.com The passage of the 1832 Reform Bill marked a turning point in modern British history. The third of three attempts in eighteen months to extend the voting franchise, the bill eventually became law on 4 June 1832 and was celebrated at a number of banquets, of which the one in the Guildhall on 11 July is the subject of Haydon's picture. Against a background of civil unrest in England, revolution in Europe and the steadfast opposition of reactionary interests in the House of Lords, Charles Grey (2nd Earl Grey) supported by his political allies, Whigs, radicals and Tory 'waverers' - many of whom are the subject of the present portrait drawings - forced the bill through. Viscount Althorp was leader for Reform in the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Reform Bill abolished a number of 'rotten' boroughs and extended the voting franchise to occupants of houses with a rental value of ten guineas or more.
In the light of the much wider reforms to the voting system which followed over the next hundred years, it may appear that the political outcome of the 1832 Reform Act was limited - to an existing electorate of about 435,000 in England and Wales, it added fewer than 250,000 voters and the landed interest in Parliament remained at nearly 500 strong. However, it is rightly revered for having laid the foundations of a legislative process which was to bring about the transfer of political power from the landed families of the 18th century to the new middle classes created by the industrial revolution and ultimately for leading to universal suffrage.
Haydon was deeply gripped by the passage of the Reform Bill. Its passage through Parliament was a tortuous affair and the crisis kept Haydon awake at night. He notes in his diary 'heart beating violently about this Reform bill'. He also notes later that he 'took up this Picture on publick [sic] principle alone'. At this time Haydon was working on The Meeting of the Unions on Newhall Hill, Birmingham, to record the successful agitation in favour of the Reform Bill. He intended to catch the great wave of political excitement sweeping the country; the picture was to be funded through subscriptions. Through lack of support however, that painting was abandoned with only sixteen portraits completed. It was on account of the need to secure subscriptions for it that Haydon had approached Lord Grey, who refused to help, as 'it would not be delicate for me as a Minister, to head any subscription connected with the unions... But I should be happy to subscribe to any other subject connected with Reform'. Lord Grey went on to suggest that 'you paint the grand dinner in the city, where we shall all be on the eleventh.'
Haydon arrived early in the morning and worked throughout the day, painting the architecture and decorations of the room 'amidst gas men & waiters & uproar' and all the preparations for the banquet. In the evening he 'dashed away' at his canvas and wrote in his diary 'spent the day at the Guildhall, and the evening was, as Paddy would say, the most splendid day of my life.' Haydon pictured himself, in profile, painting the scene at the right hand edge of the canvas. Haydon, positioned beside John Bacon's monument to the 1st Earl of Chatham, was 'an object of great interest to all the Nobility'. He found himself plied with wine, which he was obliged only to sip for fear of being 'more inspired than was requisite'.
The price for the picture was agreed as 500 guineas. Haydon then embarked upon preparing individual portraits of the guests at the banquet, making the drawings from life assembled in these albums, beginning with Lord Grey. Haydon's diary at this time is in a heightened mode, as almost every day he was meeting and conversing with major Whig figures, and he also attended the House of Lords to carry on sketching. He described in his Diary Lord Melbourne as 'a delightful, easy, frank and unaffected, man of Fashion' and wrote of Lord Althorp, who sat to him in Downing Street, 'He is not so conversational as Lord Melbourne, but the essence of good nature... He said Sir Joshua painted him when a boy. He said nothing remarkable. He has an air of rank, like all of them. I hit his expression - so said his Secretary; but I evidently saw he thought it not young enough. He brought me down Hayter's miniature, painted 19 years ago - as a work of art detestable, but he thought highly [of it]. I said what I could'.
Haydon's diary reveals how he thought he should be regarded whilst engaged in this enterprise and soliciting sittings from the attendees 'I was there by Lord Grey's desire, and as his representative, and I ought to have been treated with marked distinction. However I have a scale. Those Noblemen who come to me, Those who oblige me to come to them, And those who do not sit at all, Shall all be represented according to their respective amiabilities. With Lord Brougham, I shall have trouble. I have painted him in from a cast', 'You will give Lord Brougham a better head.', 'If he sits, my Lord' said I to Lord Melbourne. He understood me.' (He did eventually obtain an excellent likenss of Lord Brougham, taken from life).
Haydon had told Lord Grey that he would be making a sketch in oil 'while you are all at dessert', he showed the finished sketch to Lord Grey a week later. For eighteen months Haydon drew the individual portraits. Only those who actually attended the Guildhall banquet were to be shown sitting at the table. Old reformers and Whigs who were invited but did not attend, or whose contribution to the Bill required recognition, were placed in a group on the steps on the left. Several sittings were required for some of the chalk portraits and sometimes Haydon executed a sketch in oil before the head could be 'put in' to the picture. When Haydon was not sketching the sitters he would work on the background details of the picture, 22 September 'In the City, & completed my Studies of the Gold Ornaments', 1 November he notes 'Hard at work on the fruit'.
Yet the finished picture (private collection UK) was not a financial success. It took two years to complete and by the time it was finished and exhibited on 22 March 1834 the Whigs themselves were falling out of fashion. Some of the individual portraits were issued as prints and the picture itself as a print with an explanatory key.
The letters accompanying the two volumes of drawings give an account of the negotiations over their purchase. The sale evidently took place in the context of Haydon's extreme indebtedness and relate the protracted process whereby the studies were eventually handed over. There is included the transcript of a letter from Viscount Althorp to his father regarding the purchase of the drawings 'Downing Street, 8 August 1833, My dear father, I have received the enclosed note from Mr Haydon. I understand the price he is likely to ask for the Drawings is £200. Now this is more that I can conveniently give, but I send this note to you as these drawings will be an interesting collection, as they include all those who were most prominent in effecting the Reform of Parliament, and they will always be of peculiar interest to the possessor of Althorp, as they are the portraits of those who dined at the Guildhall when the freedom of the City was presented to me on the occasion of the passing of that measure. I believe you know that generally speaking the portraits are very like. Yours most dutifully and affectionately Althorp'.
It was probably this visit to Spencer House that Haydon recalls in his diary in 1833 when he remarked with admiration on Lord Spencer's Library: Here, he exclaimed, were 'rare Boccaccios, unaccountable Dantes, impossible to be found Virgils, and not to be understood first editions of Homer'.
BENJAMIN HAYDON
Haydon was born in Plymouth, Devon, the son of a printer, publisher and bookseller. He was encouraged to sketch from nature by his schoolmaster and taught his fellow pupils drawing, but was formally apprenticed to his father in 1801. Despite his family's opposition, determined to pursue a career as an artist, he left for London in 1804. Initially he undertook a period of solitary study, but eventually became a pupil of Henry Fuseli, the recently appointed Keeper of the Royal Academy. On 23 July 1808 Haydon began his famous diary, which he himself considered of great significance: 'It is the history, in fact, of my mind'. Comprising over a million words, it is full of his personal eccentricity, his own sense of achievement and exaltation and reveals his outrageous opinions and his often ludicrous behaviour.
Haydon cut a controversial and complicated figure in both his public and private life. He maintained a lifelong feud with the Royal Academy, initially over the hanging of his first major picture The celebrated old Roman tribune, Denatus, making his last desperate effort against his own soldiers, who attacked and murdered him in a narrow pass (1809). He was continually dogged by financial problems, partly because his father withdrew financial support, but also owing to his own working methods, and he was rarely free from debt, being imprisoned in 1823, 1827, 1830 and 1836. He preferred to paint large historical pictures, then considered the highest form of art, which took years to complete. The Judgement of Solomon, 1814, occupied him for two years and although it was exhibited with considerable success, Haydon himself noted that it had involved 'the most dreadful application, influenced by an enthusiasm stimulated by despair almost a delirium' and he later claimed that he had never entirely recovered. Nonetheless he continued with the same format and Christ's Entry into Jerusalem occupied him for six years. It was while he was painting this work that he beame a significant witness to the lives of many of the key writers of his time, among them Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth, (whose celebrated portrait of him musing on Helvellyn by Haydon is in the National Portrait Gallery and whose portrait study for the head of Christ in Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, 1815, executed in the same medium as the present collection of drawings and now in Dove Cottage, Grasmere, was sold in these Rooms, 9 November 1993, lot 84).
In 1827 Haydon painted the first of his subject pictures, The Mock Election (Royal Collection), based on an incident he had witnessed, soon followed by Chairing the Member (Tate Britain). He undertook by subscription The Meeting of the Unions on Newhall Hill, Birmingham (eventually abandoned as noted supra) and the huge canvas The Anti-Slavery Convention, 1841 (National Portrait Gallery).
Haydon devoted his last years to self-justification. In 1839 he began to write his autobiography and in his will he makes clear that he expects his memoirs, journal and letters to be published. As a painter he was falling out of fashion, due in part to the Prince Regent's influence on the English court and his taste for contemporary German artists. Haydon was bitterly disappointed not to be chosen as one of the artists appointed to decorate the newly built Houses of Parliament despite his lobbying for a public role for art. He committed suicide on 22 June 1846 and the jury recorded that he was of 'unsound state of mind when he committed the act'. Yet some of his contemporaries valued his achievements. Wordsworth summed up the painter for his godson, Haydon's youngest surviving son, 'Your father was a fine, frank and generous nature, a capital talker, and well-informed'. And of his art, Wordsworth said, 'he is the first painter in his grandstyle of art that England or any other country has produced since the days of Titian. He may be disregarded and scorned now by the ignorant and malevolent, but posterity would do him justice. There are things in his works that have never been surpassed, they will be the text books of art hereafter.' Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and Table Talk, ed. F.W. Haydon, 1876, 1.110.
Haydon's gravestone in the old Paddington churchyard reads 'He devoted forty-two years to the improvement of the taste of the English people in high art and died broken hearted from pecuniary distress'.
The present collection, drawn from the life, captures the characters and illustrates the personalities of the leading political figures at a time of crucial reform. Its appearance at auction provides an unprecedented opportunity to purchase one of the most important series of political portraits.
