{"id":2450,"date":"2019-07-08T12:28:05","date_gmt":"2019-07-08T12:28:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2450"},"modified":"2019-07-10T07:58:37","modified_gmt":"2019-07-10T07:58:37","slug":"stephen-copley-research-report-hiroki-iwamoto-on-benjamin-robert-haydon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2450","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Copley Research Report: Hiroki Iwamoto on Benjamin Robert Haydon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen Copley Research Award Report:<\/em><\/p>\n

Benjamin Robert Haydon Manuscripts at Houghton Library and <\/em>Christ\u2019s Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem\u00a0at the Athenaeum of Ohio \/ Mount St. Mary\u2019s Seminary<\/em><\/p>\n

This June, thanks to a BARS Stephen Copley Research Award, I was able to visit the United States to access the collection of Houghton Library at Harvard University<\/a>. My PhD thesis concerns the historical painter Benjamin Robert Haydon\u2019s influence on the poetry and poetics of John Keats, and I devoted my time at Harvard mostly to consulting the painter\u2019s (unpublished) materials that are specifically related to the poet\u2019s life and writings.<\/p>\n

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Houghton Library, Harvard University (author\u2019s photograph)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Among the rare materials that I accessed at Harvard, I was particularly pleased to be able to consult Haydon\u2019s unpublished original draft for his\u00a0Autobiography<\/em>. Haydon started this draft, which he called \u2018Vita\u2019, sometime around 1815 and is assumed to have abandoned it after 1825. Resumed as late as 1839, his Autobiography\u00a0<\/em>was published posthumously in Tom Taylor\u2019s Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon\u00a0<\/em>(1853). That is, Haydon worked on the \u2018Vita\u2019 while many of the Romantic writers were still alive. Somewhat disordered and even incomplete as it is, this voluminous manuscript (which counts more than 250 pages) not only bespeaks the vigour with which Haydon composed it, but also provides us with a version of his literary self-portrait, drawn from a perspective quite significantly different from that in the published Autobiography<\/em>. Keats scholarship has previously paid very little attention to the \u2018Vita\u2019, but I believe that a close examination of this manuscript will shed new light on our understanding of the literary and artistic milieu of the Romantic period, especially in the Keats circle.<\/p>\n

At Harvard, I was also pleased to be able to consult Haydon\u2019s transcriptions of Keats\u2019s letters. Most of them are addressed to Haydon himself, the rest to Keats\u2019s brother Tom. Since all of these letters have been already published, Haydon\u2019s transcriptions themselves are not that remarkable. Yet what makes this material singular is that Haydon \u2018annotated\u2019 some of the letters. Judging from its content, it is most plausible that Haydon sent them to Richard Monckton Milnes (later Lord Houghton) to assist him in preparing for his first biography of Keats. In fact, Milnes\u2019s 1848 biography of the poet does seem to rely on some of Haydon\u2019s annotations. Yet Milnes\u2019s book does not reproduce all of Haydon\u2019s commentary, including that on Wordsworth\u2019s (in)famous comment on Keats\u2019s recitation of Endymion\u00a0<\/em>as a \u2018pretty piece of Paganism\u2019. It now turns out that, along with the \u2018Vita\u2019, Haydon\u2019s annotated transcriptions of Keats\u2019s letters will indeed be indispensable for exploring their relationship in my thesis.<\/p>\n

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The Athenaeum of Ohio \/ Mount St. Mary\u2019s Seminary (author\u2019s photograph)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Leaving Boston (Harvard), my research trip in the US ended by seeing Haydon\u2019s large painting Christ\u2019s Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem\u00a0<\/em>at the Athenaeum of Ohio \/ Mount St. Mary\u2019s Seminary, Cincinnati<\/a>. This Catholic seminary is located a long way from the airport, and it took more than an hour by bus even from the city centre to get there. But it was a rewarding experience for me to come Cincinnati to see this painting. Visitors to this seminary can now see Haydon\u2019s painting hung awe-inspiringly in its darksome atrium. Christ\u2019s Entry\u00a0<\/em>is grand both in its scale (size) and in its conception (subject). An often vainglorious artist, Haydon modelled the face of Christ on his own, and surrounded the figure with his own contemporaries including Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb; and the painted scene served him, virtually, as a symposium of the geniuses that gathered to commemorate his own imminent \u2018entry\u2019 into the history of English art. After all, he was then about to\u2014but failed to\u2014gain far-flung fame as a great historical painter. However neglected Haydon is nowadays, Christ\u2019s Entry\u00a0<\/em>is still, I believe, his masterpiece. And those nearly life-sized figures in the canvas also seemed to induce me to feel as if I were a part of the picture, and to envisage further in my mind the animated scene when those luminaries\u2014Keats, Wordsworth, Lamb, and others\u2014enjoyed \u2018the immortal dinner\u2019 in front of this picture in late December 1817.<\/p>\n

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Benjamin Robert Haydon, Christ\u2019s Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem (1820; photo provided by: The Athenaeum of Ohio \/ Mount St. Mary\u2019s Seminary of the West in Cincinnati, Ohio U.S.A.)<\/p><\/div>\n

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I am greatly indebted to BARS for awarding me the research grant, without which this archival trip would not have been possible. And I am also very grateful to the librarians and staff at Houghton Library and the Athenaeum of Ohio \/ Mount St. Mary\u2019s Seminary for their permission to allow me to take a close look at the rare materials in their collections. Thanks to all those concerned, my research trip went very well, and will undoubtedly contribute significantly to the development of my thesis.<\/p>\n

\u2014Hiroki Iwamoto (University of Bristol)<\/em><\/p>\n

Find out how to apply for a BARS Stephen Copley Research Award here.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Stephen Copley Research Award Report: Benjamin Robert Haydon Manuscripts at Houghton Library and Christ\u2019s Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem\u00a0at the Athenaeum of Ohio \/ Mount St. Mary\u2019s Seminary This June, thanks… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2450"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2458,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450\/revisions\/2458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}