ABSTRACT
On 22 June 1846, Benjamin Robert Haydon’s professional disappointments and financial problems finally overcame him. If Haydon was caught between a civic humanist account of the public function of art, and a Romantic emphasis on the importance of individual genius in artistic creation, he was caught between different conceptions of how greatness should conduct itself. Haydon also appears in William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel The Newcomes as the comically self-promoting history painter Mr Gandish. Both these portrayals evince the Victorian challenge to the aestheticism, egotism and disdain for propriety that was associated with the Romantics. The story of the Victorian reaction to Romanticism is one of changing attitudes to art, genius and morality, and perhaps some simple generalizations about the attitudes are useful at this stage. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Romantic debate about the transgressive nature of genius had broadened out into the wider question of the role of the exceptional individual in an increasingly democratic society.
