SOURCE: Porter, Roger J. “‘In me the solitary sublimity’: Posturing and the Collapse of Romantic Will in Benjamin Robert Haydon.” In The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, edited by Robert Folkenflik, pp. 168-87. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Porter attempts to pinpoint the reason why Haydon felt the intense need to chronicle his life in his autobiography and in his journals.

On June 22, 1846, moments before he committed a kind of double suicide by shooting himself and slashing his throat, Benjamin Robert Haydon, historical painter, would-be savior of British art, and friend to both generations of romantic writers, wrote the final words in the diary he had kept for 38 of his 60 years: “‘Stretch me no longer on this tough World’—Lear.”¹ With a symmetrical gesture he could hardly have been conscious of making, Haydon was closing a parenthesis of allusion around his life. In...