Francis Hayman

Hayman, Francis (British painter, ca. 1708-1776)

LC Heading: Hayman, Francis, 1708-1776

Biography:

Hayman, Francis (1707/8–1776), painter, engraver, and book illustrator, was born perhaps in Exeter, the elder of the two recorded children of John Hayman (d. 1713) and his wife, Jane Browne. He was apprenticed for the sum of £84 in 1718 to Robert Browne, a history painter in London who may have been his maternal uncle. He began his career as a scene painter at Goodman's Fields and Drury Lane theatres. He probably made many stage sets, though evidence of only a few survives. Hayman painted a ceiling decoration showing Apollo and the muses for Goodman's Fields Theatre which was in place by 11 February 1734, two years after the theatre opened (a small watercolour copy by William Capon is in the British Museum). Two years later he was painting scenery at Henry Giffard's rival theatre at Drury Lane for William Pritchard's masque The Fall of Phaeton which was ‘much admired’ (London Daily Post, 28 Feb 1736). A couple of months later he was providing scenery to imitate Vauxhall Gardens, which, together with other documentary evidence, suggests that he specialized in landscape effects.

The 1740s were Hayman's most productive period. Following the example of William Hogarth, who became a close friend early in the decade, he began to paint conversation pieces, small-scale full-length portraits, and, occasionally, three-quarter-length portraits. Among the best of them are the portraits of members of the family of Jonathan Tyers, the entrepreneurial proprietor of the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall. Examples of these are in the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut. Most of his sitters were self-made men with literary or artistic backgrounds. Horace Walpole accurately, though unkindly, described his figures as being ‘easily distinguishable by the large noses and shambling legs’ (Walpole, 2.325).

Tyers invited Hayman to decorate the supper boxes at Vauxhall with a series of large paintings, the earliest of which were unveiled in 1742. Over fifty of Hayman's supper-box subjects, depicting such subjects as children's games, games of chance, and scenes from plays and contemporary novels, are recorded in contemporary guidebooks to Vauxhall Gardens. Fourteen of the paintings survive (some as fragments); these include May Day, or, The Milkmaids' Garland and Sliding upon the Ice (V&A) and The Play of See-Saw (Tate collection). Seven of Hayman's pen-and-brown-ink designs for his supper-box paintings survive (examples are held in Birmingham City Art Gallery, the Courtauld Institute, and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut). Eighteen of the finished paintings were engraved (by various engravers) and published by Thomas and John Bowles in 1743. Tyers also commissioned him to paint pendants of The Bad Man and The Good Man at the hour of their deaths for one of the buildings in Tyers's macabre garden at Denbies, near Dorking, Surrey. These have not survived but are known through engravings published in 1783, after Hayman's death. About the same time he was also painting the domed ceiling of a staircase at Little Haugh Hall at Nowton, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, with Apollo and the Muses Crowning Archimedes with a Laurel Wreath, which remains his only extant architectural painting.

Hayman's versatility as an artist is remarkable: for the rest of his life his output embraced history painting, canvases with theatrical subjects, and portraiture. By the end of the 1740s his conversation pieces reflected a reciprocal influence with those of the young Thomas Gainsborough. Gainsborough appears to have worked closely with Hayman and provided the background landscape for at least one of his portraits (that of Elizabeth and Charles Bedford, c.1746; priv. coll.). Hayman is also known to have collaborated with George Lambert the landscapist, and his close friend. In the same decade, under the influence of Hubert-François Gravelot and sometimes with his collaboration, he became one of the most prolific designers of book illustrations. He notably illustrated the 1742 edition of Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela, Sir Thomas Hanmer's edition of Shakespeare of 1743–4, and Dr Thomas Newton's editions of Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain'd in 1749 and 1752 respectively. Pen-and-ink drawings for some book illustrations exist in the British Museum, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, and Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire. These designs frequently provided subject matter for his larger history paintings. Hayman married twice. Nothing is known of his first wife, but his second wife, whom he married on 25 April 1752 at Petersham in Surrey, was Susanna Fleetwood (née Williams), the widow of his friend Charles Fleetwood; he outlived her.

In 1742 Hayman became a member of the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks (the Beefsteak Club); by mid-decade he had become, with Gravelot and James Wills, an active promoter and instructor at the St Martin's Lane Academy; and in 1746, through the influence of Hogarth, he donated The Finding of the Infant Moses in the Bulrushes to the Foundling Hospital, where it still hangs as one of the four large canvases for the court room. In 1748 he accompanied Hogarth to France, his only recorded trip abroad. By 1753, against Hogarth's will, the St Martin's Lane Academy sought official recognition and Hayman chaired the committee of artists who wished to establish a ‘public academy’ (Daily Advertiser, 23 Oct 1753). The first stage in this long-drawn-out process was the founding of the Society of Artists, which held its first public exhibition in 1760. So as not to be deflected from an important commission for four history pictures for the rotunda in Vauxhall Gardens (one was engraved by S. F. Ravenet) Hayman resigned the chairmanship. His successor was George Lambert, who died suddenly in 1765 just as the organization received its royal charter of incorporation. Hayman accepted the presidency, and his easy-going character was considered a valuable asset in handling the disagreements that had developed between the committee and the membership. As Thomas Jones remarked, ‘Fran. Hayman persuade[d] the disputants to lay aside their mutual Bickerings, and drown their Heartburnings in bumpers of wine’ (Oppé, 13–14). These difficulties must have sapped his artistic strength and he produced little work in the late 1760s; indeed, by this time his work had become tired, characterized by clumsy draughtsmanship and garish colouring.

In 1768 Hayman was voted out of the office of president and retired from the furtive negotiations that culminated in the formation of the Royal Academy on 10 December 1768. In 1770 he was given the post of librarian of the Royal Academy as a sinecure. Plagued by gout, he died in London on 2 February 1776 at the age of sixty-eight and was buried in St Anne's Church, Soho, close to where he lived in Dean Street. His only daughter, Susannah, was granted the administration of Hayman's considerable estate.

Hugh Belsey

(Hugh Belsey, ‘Hayman, Francis (1707/8–1776)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/12771, accessed 14 April 2016])