Every canvas is a stage
Francis Hayman rose from humble beginnings as a stage-set painter to become an established artist, but always returned to plays for inspiration
THEATRE gave Francis Hayman his break. Born in Devon, the artist (1707/8–76) moved to London at a young age to be apprenticed to a minor history painter. Soon, he began working on stage sets, first at Goodman’s Fields, then at Drury Lane, and was so successful that he appeared in an anonymous poem on the art of acting: ‘Hayman by scenes our Senses can controul/and with creative Power charm the Soul.’
One of his greatest patrons, John Robartes, 4th Earl of Radnor, believed these theatrical origins had held Hayman back. ‘If He Had not fool’d away many years at the beginning of life painting Harlequins, trap doors, &c. for the play House, he would certainly by this time be the greatest man of His Age,’ the Earl wrote in 1741 (a judgement with which Horace Walpole, who disparaged Hayman’s skills, must have wholly disagreed). However, at a time when opportunities for painters were limited, theatre work had provided an income—and a springboard. The step from stage scenery to theatrical subjects was short and Hayman became a pioneer of the genre, which he never abandoned, even as he found success in history painting.
In the 1740s, his most prolific years, he produced 31 illustrations for Sir Thomas Hanmer’s Shakespeare, a book that may have contributed to increasing the number of the Bard’s plays put on in London, which, in turn, may have helped Hayman secure commissions from actors such as David Garrick, whose first on-stage portrait he completed in 1747. The two would remain lifelong friends, the thespian occasionally giving the artist suggestions on how to paint Shakespearean scenes based on his own interpretations.
As late as 1760, Hayman’s entry for the very first exhibition of the Society of Artists, of which he had been a co-founder, was a portrait of Garrick in Richard III.
Plays—whether Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor or Robert Dodsley’s The King and the Miller of Mansfield—supplied handy inspiration for the supper boxes Hayman painted in the 1740s for Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, where he had to ‘invent a genre of public painting without any of the religious or mythological overtones,’ according to Charles Saumarez Smith’s Eighteenth-century Decoration. So steeped was Hayman in the theatre that he may even have trodden the boards himself. According to Brian Allen’s
Francis Hayman, records show that someone with his surname played Macheath in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in 1743 and had small roles in several other West End performances, including Hamlet.
Yet, if there ever was a part Hayman could have played, that would have been Falstaff, a character that, as Dr Allen notes, he painted frequently and to whom he bore more than a passing resemblance—in prodigious appetite, as well as looks. Legend has it that, as a young man, Hayman (later an honoured member of the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks) would gobble down so much food, together with his fellow apprentices, that crowds would gather to see ‘the Great Eaters’ in action.
Like Falstaff, he was humorous, albeit also possessed of ‘more than a common portion of wit,’ according to critic Anthony Pasquin. When Hayman painted poet Moses Mendez, who had wished to keep the commission secret, a friend criticised the portrait for having ‘not a trait of [the sitter’s] countenance’—to which the artist replied: ‘Why, to tell the truth, he desired it might not be known.’
It certainly is in a Falstaffian manner that Hayman attempted to settle the quarrel that rent the Society of Artists in the 1760s. According to painter Thomas Jones, he tried to ‘persuade the disputants to… drown their Heartburnings in bumpers of wine’. Alas, it didn’t work: Hayman was voted out of his society office in October 1768 and refused to return when recalled a month later, becoming instead a founder of the Royal Academy, where he was appointed Librarian. It’s in this guise that, in 1772, four years before his death, he appeared in Johan Zoffany’s painting of the Academicians, his cheek ruddy, his waistcoat strained, his legs akimbo, looking every inch a Falstaff.