Dimensions support: 121 x 98 mm
Editor: This is a pen and ink drawing of Sir George Beaumont by Benjamin Robert Haydon. It’s a small sketch, with two profile views of the same man. He looks rather stern. What can you tell me about this portrait? Curator: It's fascinating to consider this work within the social hierarchy of the time. Beaumont, as a patron of the arts, held significant power. The artist, Haydon, captures a certain intensity, perhaps even unease. Could this reflect the artist's own position relative to his patron? Editor: That's interesting. So, the drawing may be about more than just a likeness? Curator: Exactly. Consider Haydon's struggles and debts. Could this portrait also be a commentary on the power dynamics inherent in artistic patronage? It's about looking beyond the surface and understanding the social fabric in which art is produced. Editor: I see. It makes me consider the power structures between artist and patron. Curator: Absolutely. Art is never created in a vacuum.
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http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/haydon-sir-george-beaumont-a00192
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Drawn while inspecting a picture at the British Institution, Beaumont was the most influential connoisseur and patron of painting and poetry in Regency London. He intensely disliked Turner's work and was distinctly cool towards Byron, whose intellect Lady Beaumont - also a lover of poetry - considered 'near derangement'. The Beaumonts preferred to support Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, the Lake Poets whom Byron satirised in his first popular poem, 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers' (1809). Turner and Byron might well have made common cause over this arbiter of taste, who saw nothing in one of them and everything in the colleagues the other most despised. Gallery label, August 2004
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