Book description
* Haydon's first attempt at suicide ended when the low calibre
bullet fired from his pistol fractured his skull but failed to
penetrate his brain.
* His second attempt also failed: a deep slash across his
throat left a large pool of blood at the entrance to his studio, but
he was still able to reach his easel on the opposite side of the room.
*Only his third attempt, another cut to the throat which
sprayed blood across his unfinished canvas, was successful. He died
face-down before the bespattered 'Alfred and the First British Jury',
his final bid 'to improve the taste of the English people' through the
High Art of historical painting.
* Such intensity, struggle and near-comic inability to
succeed encapsulate Haydon's career. Thirty years before his death
his huge, iconic paintings had made him the toast of early
19th-century London, drawing paying crowds to the Egyptian Hall in
Piccadilly for months and leading to nationwide tours.
* However, his attempt to repeat such success three months before
his death was to destroy him: barely a soul turned up, leaving the
desperate painter alone, humiliated, and facing financial ruin.
* In A Genius for Failure Paul O'Keeffe makes clear that the
real tragedy of Haydon lay in the extent to which his failures were
unwittingly engineered by his own actions - his refusal to
resort to the painting of fashionable portraits, for example, and his
self-destructively acrimonious relationship with the RA.
* The company he kept - Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Sir Robert Peel
and the Duke of Wellington, among many others - and the momentous
events he lived through - The Battle of Waterloo, the Coronation of
George IV, and the passing of the first Parliamentary Reform Bill -
make A Genius for Failure not only the definitive
biography of this fascinating and tragic painter, but a
stirring portrayal of an age.
Paul O'Keeffe is a freelance lecturer and writer based in Liverpool.
He gained his Ph. D. with a scholarly edition of Wyndham Lewis's
Tarr
, and won critical acclaim with his 2000 study of Lewis,
Some Sort of Genius
.
