Art, Genius, and Racial Theory in the Early Nineteenth Century

Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846) was one of the foremost historical painters of his day and believed passionately that he was the great hero-genius who was to lead the ‘British School’ of art to victory over its Continental rivals. This article considers his formulation and propagation of bioracist ideas around 1810 – and his repudiation of those ideas after being commissioned to paint the Worldwide Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 – in the context of his anxieties about his own genius and place in history, and of more commonly-shared concerns about Britain’s place in the world. For much of his career, Haydon held views in which a theory of how best to represent the heroic figure was intertwined with a belief in the existence of a fixed hierarchy of racial types. He used the new model of inherent racial difference between Europeans and Africans in order to efface older ideas of environmentally produced national difference between, for example, the British and the Ancient Greeks. Paradoxically, this was in the service of a vigorously nationalistic conception of British art. His repudiation of racial theory in 1840 did not lead to the weakening of this conception, because his experience of painting the Anti-Slavery Convention allowed him a different and more powerful way of affirming his status as an artist, and the noble future of British art and the British Empire. The fact that he had been chosen to depict an event which supposedly signified Britain’s spiritual superiority to the rest of the world, and a strong personal identification with the abolitionist hero Thomas Clarkson, led to a resurgence of Haydon’s faith in the divine inspiration that he thought marked him out as a great man engaged in a task of national importance. His views on racial difference changed because this faith became dependent in part on the rhetoric surrounding abolitionism, in particular a Christian universalist idea of race.

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Context (archaeology) · Convention · Genius · Greeks · HERO · Literature · Painting · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Victory · Classics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law

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