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History Workshop Journal 58 (2004) 17-40



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Art, Genius, and Racial Theory in the Early Nineteenth Century:

Benjamin Robert Haydon

Early in June 1840 the executive committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society commissioned the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon to produce a painting to commemorate the Worldwide Anti-Slavery Convention, which was to take place at the Freemasons' Tavern in London later that month (Fig. 2).1 The painting was a critical and commercial failure: Haydon had to include an enormous number of individual portraits—many painted from sketches taken at great speed—resulting in monotonous rows of curiously disembodied heads. However, in the foreground of the painting he placed an arresting vignette which was intended to affirm the ideals of the anti-slavery movement. In the pamphlet he wrote to accompany the painting's exhibition in 1841, he describes how he chose to depict a moment towards the end of the rapturously acclaimed speech made by Abolition's aged hero, Thomas Clarkson:

A liberated slave, now a delegate, is looking up to Clarkson with deep interest, and the hand of a friend is resting with affection on his arm, in fellowship and protection; this is the point of interest in the picture, and illustrative of the object in painting it—the African sitting by the intellectual European, in equality and intelligence, whilst the patriarch of the cause points to heaven as to whom he must be grateful.

Haydon had not previously been involved in anti-slavery agitation, but from this passage (and the painting itself) we can see that he had absorbed its rhetoric, which, on the one hand, represented black people as intrinsically equal to whites, but, on the other, stereotyped them as 'children' who were in need of the education and protection that Christian civilization could provide.2

Even allowing for his characteristic hyperbole, Haydon was clearly inspired by Clarkson's speech, explaining that it left him 'so affected and astonished, that it was many minutes before I recovered'. His pamphlet describing the painting is, in a sense, a conversion narrative, for he had once held views on racial difference that would have been anathema to most of the Convention's delegates: [End Page 17]


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Figure 1
'B. R. Haydon, Historical Painter. From a Bust by PARK', frontispiece to vol. 2 of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Lectures on Painting and Design, 2 vols, London, 1844-6. Reproduced with permission of Leeds University Library.
[End Page 18]
There was a time when I believed that the negro, however deep his sympathies and affectionate his heart, was separated from the intellectual European irrevocably; when I believed his brain and bodily conformation were so inherently deficient, that no education and no ameliorated condition could ever improve them. I have lived, I thank God, to be convinced to the contrary. The head of this negro, Beckford, 27 years a slave, and the other, Barrett, 57, are as fine in physical construction of brain as any European in the picture.3

Here Haydon is describing his shift from a belief that blacks are 'irrevocably' inferior to whites to the view that they could be 'improved' by emancipation and education, although his emphasis on 'physical construction of brain' as a sign of this improvement shows that he still adheres to the craniological assumptions which underpinned much nineteenth-century racial theory. Thus Henry Beckford (who appears in the foreground of the painting) is revealed to be a civilized individual by the fact that his physiognomy is similar to that of the whites who surround him. This depiction can be compared with the prognathic physiognomy of the black servant in Haydon's early painting The Judgment of Solomon (1814), which is meant to signify his primitive nature (Fig. 3).

This article will examine Haydon's ideas about race in detail, for the story of their formulation and alteration is rather more complex and troubled than he suggests. The painter's biological racism, I will argue, was closely related to his anxieties about his own...

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