Lot 171: WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM (1770-1850, poet, Poet Laureate)

PORTRAIT BY BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON (1786-1846),
pencil drawing, head in profile, with a sketch in pen and ink on the verso for Wordsworth's figure in Haydon's picture Chirist's Entry into Jerusalem, in which Newton, Keats and Hazlitt also appeared, 81/4 x 73/4 in (21 x 19.7 cm).

EXHIBITED: Wordsworth Trust, Writers Homes Exhibition, 1994, and Haydon Exhibition, 1996; Cheltenham Literary Festival, Faces and Places, 1982; British Library Millennium Exhibition Chapter & Verse: 1000 years of English Literature, 2000; the drawing on the reverse was used on the poster for the conference 'Wordsworth's "Second Selves", The Poetic Afterlife, 1798-2002', Lancaster University.

This portrait of Wordsworth is clearly derived from the life mask Haydon took of Wordsworth on 12 June 1815 and which 'served as a guide to Haydon when he painted his first portrait of Wordsworth, one figure in the huge history painting, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem.' (Frances Blanchard, Portraits of Wordsworth, 1959, p.51).

Haydon described taking the life mask in his Diary: 'I had a cast made yesterday of Wordworth's face. He bore it like a philosopher. John Scott was to meet him at breakfast, and just as he came in the plaster was put on. Wordsworth was sitting in the other room in my dressing gown, with his hands folded, sedate, solemn and still. I stepped into Scott and told him as a curiosity to take a peep, that he might say the first sight he ever had of so great a poet was in this stage towards immortality. I opened the door slowly, and there he sat, innocent and unconscious of our plot, in mysterious stillness and silence.' (op. cit., p.52).

The sketch on the verso of this drawing can be identified as Wordsworth from the singular nature of the nose and as a trial for the picture Christ's Entry from the pose ('bowing in reverence and awe') and the voluminous sleeve. Hazlitt, a portrait painter himself, thought the image in Christ's Entry one of the best likenesses of Wordsworth: 'the most like his drooping weight of thought and expression.' (op.cit., p.52).

When this drawing was sold at Christie's it was noted that it was 'said to have inscribed on the original mount "Wordsworth from Life"'. It had been previously sold at Sotheby's (as the Property of Mrs. E.M. Hellaby on 5 April 1973, lot 23) when it was in association with, and probably from, an album of drawings by Haydon dated 1815.