Out of study window

Sir Francis Seymour Haden (1818-1910) was an amateur printmaker in the true sense of the word. A surgeon by profession, he chose etching as a hobby, but soon developed his technique to a high artistic level. Through his work, his speeches and his activities in the Royal Society of Painter Etchers which he founded, he helped to popularise the medium in England, France and the United States, and he eventually saw its status secured in official art circles.

Although Haden made his first etchings around 1845, it was not until twelve years later that he began to seriously create in the medium. At first he worked closely with great American-born artist James McNeill Whistler, his brother-in-law, but eventually their relationship disintegrated as their aesthetics took divergent paths and Whistler's ego (and genius) got the better of him. To his credit, Haden never 'dissed' Whistler's etchings thereafter, though he could stand him personally no longer. More stylistically conservative than Whistler but an excellent technician, Haden was at his best when producing romantic, serene landscapes in either pure etching or etching and mezzotint.

The importance of line and light is pre-eminent in his work and reflects the influence of earlier English artists such as the Norwich school, as well as 17th century Dutch artists like Rembrandt. Although Haden viewed etching as a spontaneous medium, many of his most important compositions were first worked out in preliminary drawings and progressed through several states. Recognition of his art came in the form of a knighthood (which Whistler sneered at), publications, exhibitions and the increased popularity of the etching medium to which he devoted his artistic life. Haden did much to put etching on the map at the Royal Academy and to make its practitioners eligible for election. He has been given something of a raw deal by art historians, seduced by Whistler's brilliance; solidity and loyalty to the craft, which Haden had in spades, are too often overlooked - as is his art.

Etched from an upper window in Haden's house on Sloane Street in Chelsea, the image shows the view across Kensington, towards Brompton, as it looked in 1859. An impression of this etching was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861.

Here we can appreciate Haden’s remarkable ability to capture the atmosphere of a fresh, showery day through his free and evocative use of line. The rain has just passed and the effect of light breaking through cloud across the distant view of an unbelievably rural looking London is perfectly expressed with total spontaneity. The subject matter is deliberately banal; Haden's emphasis is certainly not narrative, but on realism and technique. He depicted what he did because it was there - exactly the same motives lay behind Ford Madox Brown's slightly earlier realist masterpiece An English Autumn Afternoon (1853). When the disapproving critic John Ruskin asked why Brown chose to paint it, the artist tersely replied “because it lay out of a back window”.

See:

The Annex Galleries, 'Francis Seymour Haden', https://www.annexgalleries.com/artists/biography/916/Haden/Francis

Campbell Fine Art, http://www.campbell-fine-art.com/items.php?id=618

Wikipedia, 'Francis Seymour Haden', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Seymour_Haden

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art    August 2018