by Karl Shaw
For now, Haydon’s star was on the rise. His trademark was very dull, epic historical scenes painted on enormous canvases. He believed that size was important – the bigger the better. The subjects were usually biblical, such as The Judgment of Solomon, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem and The Raising of Lazarus. Sticking with the biblical theme, he used to kneel in front of his canvases and pray for inspiration before every painting session.
Haydon was convinced that his massive works were much better than the smaller paintings turned out by the likes of his highly successful contemporaries Constable and Turner, because there was much more work involved in painting larger-than-life-size on a huge canvas. In keeping with his distorted and grandiose view of himself, he had a literally distorted view of his work. To begin with, Haydon had terrible problems with physical proportions. Because of his early interest in medicine, he liked to think he was an expert on human anatomy and there are accounts of him compulsively checking the proportions of his own legs as he painted. But the legs he painted were always curiously short in relation to the rest of the body. Part of the problem was that he generally worked on his huge canvases in small, dimly lit rooms, which meant he could never stand back far enough to see the overall impression. He also suffered from very poor eyesight and painted while wearing two or three pairs of spectacles, one pair over the other.
Haydon also followed the new pseudo-science of phrenology – the analysis of a person’s skull shape. He thought that his own head shape was near perfect, in his words, “noble and Socratic”. So rather than pay for models, he painted his own features on to his subjects, something the critics had fun with at his expense. When his painting Curtius Leaping into the Gulf was unveiled to terrible reviews in 1843, it was obvious that Curtius was a Haydon self-portrait, but the critics pretended not to recognize him. The art critic from the Spectator described Curtius as having a “florid, chubby-cheeked physiognomy”.18
In spite of his early successes and his influential friends, Haydon was never to hit the heights he felt he deserved. Painting on an epic scale also took much longer to do and it took him about five years to complete a single canvas. His painting Reform Banquet, for example, contained 597 individual portraits. With a new wife and rapidly growing family to support, he had committed himself to a way of working which meant long periods with no income.
In 1810, he started to get into serious financial difficulties when an allowance of £200 a year from his father was stopped. He temporarily maintained solvency through the generosity of friends and by borrowing heavily. For years, he toiled for sixteen hours or more a day on his canvasses, only to have his efforts panned by art critics. He spent the last twenty-five years of his life close to bankruptcy and was imprisoned five times for debt.
Haydon got into lengthy disputes with patrons over money. He was once asked by Sir Robert Peel to paint a picture, then almost as soon as he got the commission started writing to Peel demanding more money than had been agreed.
Haydon’s lifelong battle with the art world, meanwhile, grew steadily more acrimonious. He published defamatory pamphlets about the Royal Academy and appeared before a select committee to complain about its incompetence and alleged corruption. It was professional suicide.
Constantly short of money and frustrated by lack of recognition, his financial situation grew steadily more dire. Meanwhile, his battle with the art establishment came to a head in 1846. He tried to win a commission to decorate the new House of Lords with six huge canvases on historical themes. The new Fine Arts Committee overlooked him in favour of a much younger artist. Haydon retaliated by staging an exhibition of the six paintings that had just been rejected in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London. Haydon’s show, put on at his own expense, was an embarrassing failure. The American dwarf entertainer General Tom Thumb was appearing next door and the public voted with its feet. In the first week of the exhibition, Haydon’s pictures took £7 13s. while the dwarf took £600.
It was the most humiliating snub of his painting career. Four weeks later, on the morning of 22 June 1846, in the studio of his London home, he made a note on the final page of his journal: “God forgive me – Amen . . . Finis of BR Haydon . . . “Stretch me no longer on this tough world” – Lear . . . End.”
Then, in the same way that everything else in his life had gone horribly wrong, the sixty-year-old put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger, but somehow managed not to kill himself. He then took a razor, braced himself at the door and cut his own throat from right to left, but so badly that he had to do it again. After a second attempt, this time cutting from left to right but still missing the carotid artery, he collapsed.
His wife and daughter downstairs heard a thump as his body hit the floor, but assumed he was manhandling his final, gigantic, unfinished painting. His daughter discovered him later when she came into the room and slipped in a puddle of her father’s blood.
After his death, a phrenologist felt Haydon’s bumps and declared that he had artistic talent, but not very much. He also noted that, despite Haydon’s alleged interest in anatomy, he hadn’t even known how to cut his own throat properly.
Charles Dickens noted, “All his life he had utterly mistaken his vocation . . . he most unquestionably was a very bad painter.”
Rags to Riches . . . to Rags
In the mid-1850s, the American John Banvard was arguably the world’s best-known living artist. He was adored by royalty, fêted by such great contemporaries as Charles Dickens and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and incredibly rich – possibly the first millionaire artist in history. Thirty-five years later, he died penniless, laid to rest in a pauper’s grave in a remote frontier town, his most famous works destroyed and his name all but expunged from the history books.
Banvard was born in 1815 in New York. His father Daniel was a successful builder and a dabbler in art himself. Young John showed an aptitude for sketching, writing and science. The latter interest backfired one day when he was experimenting with hydrogen and it exploded in his face, badly injuring his eyes. The family business ran into trouble in 1831 when Daniel Banvard suffered a stroke and died, then his business partner ran off with the company assets. Fifteen-year-old John watched as his family’s possessions were auctioned off in a bankruptcy sale.
John Banvard decided to move to seek work. He found it in Louisville in 1833 when he was offered a job as a scene painter on a showboat called the Floating Theatre. The pay was so poor that it barely kept him from starvation, but it gave him lots of practice in rapid sketching and painting of very large scenery. This skill would later prove invaluable and gave Banvard the idea that he might operate his own showboats on which he would display his paintings.
The following year he disembarked at New Harmony, Ohio, and he and three or four young acquaintances built a flat boat and kitted it out for their own floating theatre company, having apparently funded the venture by swindling a gullible backer out of his life savings. Banvard served as scene painter, actor and director.
For a couple of years, he and his friends survived by displaying his landscape paintings and improvizing Shakespeare and other popular plays up and down the river for customers who bartered their way into performances with live poultry and bags of potatoes, but at least Banvard and his troupe weren’t going hungry. Banvard was brought low by bouts of malaria and, when the audience stopped coming, he was reduced to begging on the docks. But he was now a hardened showman with years of experience behind him and he was still only a teenager.
Eventually, a local stage manager took pity on him and hired him as a scene painter. It was around this time that he first experimented in painting “panoramas”. These were long, continuous canvases that were slowly cranked from one spool to another, so that the scene moved in front of the viewer across the stage and gave audiences the illusion of viewing moving scenery, as though from a boat or the window of a train. These 360-degree paintings were generally displayed in purpose-built circular rotundas and were usually repre
sentations of nature, battle scenes and exotic locations. The effect of total immersion in the depicted scene was enhanced by a musical accompaniment and skilful manipulation of lighting.
During the early 1800s, audiences flocked by the thousands to see the latest panoramas. It is difficult to judge the actual quality of these paintings as few in the audience would have been able to stand close enough to the moving painting to study them in detail, but there was no doubt about the effect they had on audiences: one visitor described the experience of seeing the panorama pass by as “spine-tingling”.
When Banvard was a young boy in New York, he had marvelled at these gigantic rolls of painted canvas depicting seaports and “A Trip to Niagara Falls”. He decided to try his hand at his own moving landscapes of Venice and Jerusalem. His biggest painting was a moving panorama that he described as “Infernal Regions”. Nearly a hundred feet in length, it was completed and sold in 1841 and, to date, it was his biggest success. Meanwhile, he had his eye on a greater project: he was planning a painting so huge that it would dwarf any attempted before or since. He was going to paint a portrait of the Mississippi river.
In April 1842, he bought a skiff, filled it with provisions, pencils and sketch pads, and set off down the Mississippi to sketch the river from St Louis all the way to New Orlando, a distance of around 1,200 miles. The physical and creative challenges he faced were immense.
For the next two years, he paddled down the river filling his sketch pads with drawings, braving blistering summer heat and bouts of yellow fever. His skin became so burnt that it peeled from the backs of his hands and his face. He survived by occasionally pulling into river ports to sell cigars, household goods, anything he could lay his hands on to trade with river folk.
When he had finished sketching in 1844, Banvard built a barn on the outskirts of Louisville to house the huge bolts of canvas that he had ordered to complete his gigantic painting. His next challenge was to devise some sort of system to hold his huge canvas in place and prevent it from sagging. His solution to this problem was so ingenious that he was able to patent it and it was featured in a scientific journal a few years later.
For several months, Banvard worked furiously on his panoramic canvas, meanwhile holding down two or three part-time jobs to feed himself. Finally, he was ready to unveil his mammoth creation.
Using all of the sales techniques he had learned on the river, he worked his way through the local docks, chatting to steamboat crews and handing out free tickets to a special afternoon matinée. The sailors who turned up were amazed by the panoramic painted landscape that unfurled before their eyes. As Banvard cranked the canvas past them, he would describe his travels, adding tall tales of pirates and close encounters with frontier brigands. His showmanship did the trick; news of Banvard’s painting spread by word of mouth and, within the week, he found himself playing to a packed house every night.
After his successful début, Banvard went back to the studio and added more sections to his painting, then he moved to a bigger venue. Meanwhile, the crowds, and the money, continued to pour in. Now Banvard was ready to take his “Three-Mile Painting”19 to the centre of American culture – Boston. By the time Banvard installed his canvas in Boston’s Armory Hall in December 1846, he had honed his narration and commissioned a concert pianist to accompany it, meanwhile hiding the cranking machinery from the audience’s view. It was an immediate smash hit. Over the next six months, over a quarter of a million Bostonians paid 50c. a head to see his extraordinary synthesis of moving art, narrative and music. He made a cool profit $100,000. In less than a year, he had gone from a starving boat sign painter to the country’s highest-earning artist. And there was more happy news – the young pianist he hired to accompany his presentations, Elizabeth Godman, became his wife.
Banvard was now the talk of America. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had never been anywhere near the Mississippi but had seen one of Banvard’s Boston shows, was inspired to write his Mississippi river epic Evangeline.
In 1847, Banvard moved his show to New York to even bigger crowds and even greater adulation and profit. The money coming in from his show was so good that rather than count the night’s takings, the banks simply weighed them.
With success also came imitation. For several years, panoramas of the American frontier dominated popular art. Samuel Stockwell, Leon Pomarede and Henry Lewis all produced Western panoramas nearly as large as Banvard’s. Another artist, John Rowson Smith, produced a “Four-Mile Painting”, although the title was misleading. Meanwhile, unscrupulous promoters attempted to copy Banvard’s painting and show the pirated work abroad as the genuine article.
But Banvard’s work remained by far the most popular and the most successful. Rather than being considered, as one modern critic has put it, a mere “folk painter of geographic newsreels”, he was praised by his contemporaries as a contributor to the artistic, educational and scientific knowledge of the American wilderness.
In 1848, Banvard took his show to England, starting with a series of short exhibitions in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham. In November, he opened in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, charming his audience by peppering his talk with humorous anecdotes in his novel, flat American drawl. The London Observer wrote: “This is truly an extraordinary work. We have never seen anything so grand in its character”. The London Morning Advertiser agreed: “It is a great work which not only astonishes by its magnitude and grandeur, but is highly instructive and interesting.”
Not everyone was impressed. A notable dissenter, the Victorian gossip columnist Henry Crabbe Robinson, called the painting an “execrable daub of a picture” and said, “the intense vulgarity of the Yankee explainer actually excited disgust.” But Robinson was a minority voice. More importantly, the British public loved Banvard’s show. Running for a year in London, it drew more than half a million spectators. Charles Dickens was a huge fan, and wrote Banvard an admiring note: “I was in the highest degree interested and pleased by your picture.”
Meanwhile, his autobiography – Banvard, or The Adventures of an Artist – was flying off the bookshelves. He also experienced something he could never have dreamed of in America – the royal seal of approval. On 11 April 1849, he was summoned to Windsor Castle for a private performance for Queen Victoria. Banvard was already an extremely rich man, but this was the icing on the cake. He was no longer merely a talented showman, he was now a respectable artist. Banvard would remember this performance as his very finest hour.
Later that year, his life-size portrait was painted by the English artist Anna Mary Howitt. Appropriately, this was also a very big canvas. Banvard’s height was estimated by those who knew him at between six feet four inches and six feet eight and a quarter inches.
Success brought even more imitators and, by 1850, there were at least fifty competing panoramic shows in London alone. His shows were also infiltrated by rivals, who sent “spies” – actually art students – to sit in the audience and furiously copy as his work rolled by.
Banvard eventually went back to the studio to create another epic canvas. His first painting had been a panoramic view of the eastern bank of the Mississippi. His new work would depict the western bank. While the original work was still showing in London with a stand-in narrator, Banvard took his new painting on a tour of Britain bringing in another 100,000 visitors. He then moved his show to Paris, where it was once again a sensation, running for the next two years.
During his stay in London, he had been fascinated by the collection of Egyptian artefacts in the Royal Museum. He even learned how to decipher hieroglyphics – one of only a handful of people in the world at that time to have acquired this skill – and became so adept at this that, back in America, he was able to draw large crowds as a lecturer in Egyptology.
The following year, he went to the Middle East and sailed down the Nile, filling his notebook with new sketches, the basis of the first of two new panoramas: one of the Nile, one of Palestine. Along th
e way, he was using his skill at deciphering hieroglyphics to snap up thousands of local artefacts at knockdown prices. He coined the phrase “Georama” to describe his latest geographic panoramas, but neither was quite as successful as his Mississippi paintings. The public was starting to grow bored with panoramic lectures and the market was flooded with imitators.
Not that this should have troubled Banvard greatly. He was now a fantastically wealthy man, the richest artist in history. In 1852, he returned to America with his growing family and bought a sixty-acre lot on Long Island, where he built a replica of Windsor Castle. He called it Glenada in honour of his daughter. The locals, unimpressed by this tacky display of ostentation, knew it as Banvard’s Folly.
By the 1860s, America was in thrall to another great showman, arguably the shrewdest the world had ever seen – the great Phineas T. Barnum. His shows were a heady cocktail of freaks, circus acts, magic acts and fraud (for example, exhibiting the “161-year-old” nursemaid of George Washington). To lend some credibility to his shows, mixed in with the items of questionable provenance, Barnum had also bought up some genuine museum exhibits, including some unusual natural history artefacts.
By 1866, Barnum’s ticket sales were more than thirty-five million – more than the actual population of North America.
After a few years of critical and commercial success, living quietly with his family was not enough for Banvard – he was bored and hungry for more. While sitting in his castle full of genuine Egyptian artefacts, he had a brainwave. For several years, he had been toying with the idea of showing his collection in a museum. Now he decided to take on P. T. Barnum, the greatest showman on Earth, at his own game.
For all his years of touring with his panoramic paintings, Banvard had never actually run a proper business before; at least, not a fully functioning operation with a staff to maintain. He had got by in the past with the help of a single secretary, whom he eventually fired when he suspected her of stealing a few dollars from him.