ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that both Benjamin Robert Haydon and his critics were so thoroughly imbricated in the commercialized construction and consumption of genius that the efforts to separate culture and commerce proved very difficult to sustain. Haydon’s career was spent trying to bully the world into accepting that he was the great artist who was to lead the ‘British School’ of art to victory over its Continental rivals. In the late 1810s and early 1820s, Haydon received more press attention than any other British artist and was widely fêted as a man capable of emulating the great Italian painters of the Renaissance. ‘Guy Fawkes Treated Classically’ actually contains two images of Haydon, for if the figure of Guy Fawkes represents him as heroic genius, the tiny figure of the artist who is so dwarfed by his painting represents him as a quack touting his marvel to the watching public.
