Archive Item of the Month – January 2021
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Haydn left Vienna on 1 December 1790 for a visit to London in the company of violinist Johann Peter Salomon (1734-1815, Member A069). They arrived in Dover on the afternoon of 1 January 1791. On arriving in London, Haydn was a guest of the music publisher John Bland in his home above the shop at No.45 Holborn. Bland appears to have commissioned a portrait of the composer from Thomas Hardy (1756/7-1804), an artist who painted several portraits of musical figures; his portraits of Madame Mara, Madame Gautherot, Madame Krumpholz and Samuel Arnold, alongside the Haydn portrait, were exhibited at the Royal Academy in May 1792. Many of these were also engraved by the artist and the prints were sold at Bland’s music shop; the engraving of the Haydn portrait was first advertised for sale on 13 February 1792.
The artist John Hoppner was the son of German parents: his father was a physician at court, his mother worked at the royal palace, and John was a chorister in the Chapel Royal with extended active patronage given to him as a boy by King George III. Hoppner entered the Royal Academy in 1775 and, following an early period of landscape painting, soon turned to fashionable portrait painting. The Prince of Wales had several works by Hoppner hanging in St James’s Palace and appointed him Principal Portrait Painter in 1793. Haydn was invited by the Prince of Wales to visit his brother, Prince Frederick (1763-1827), Duke of York, at Oatlands near Weybridge in Surrey. In his notebook Haydn wrote on 24 November 1791
“…The Prince of Wales wants my portrait. For 2 days we played music for 4 hours in the evening, that is, from 10 o’clock till 2 o’clock in the morning, then we had supper and went to bed at 3 o’clock”,
and in a letter to Maria Anna von Genzinger (1754-1793) of 20 December 1791 he wrote
“… The Prince of Wales is having my portrait painted just now and the picture is to hang in his room …”
(translated in H.C. Robbins Landon, The Collected Correspondence and London Notebooks of Joseph Haydn, pp.272 and 123).
Oil on canvas attributed to Mather Brown (1761-1831) after the portrait by John Hoppner (1758-1810).
The portrait was started by Hoppner but had not been finished by the time Haydn left England on 23 July 1792. A writer in the Quarterly Review noted “it was so striking a likeness of this extraordinary man, that the Prince of Wales, for whom it was painted, would not permit Hoppner to touch it after his departure”. The portrait remained unfinished at the time of the artist’s death in 1810 and was then purchased by the Prince of Wales as an “unfinished portrait” (see Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 406987).
Following a portrait of Prince Frederick in 1788, Mather Brown was appointed as History and Portrait Painter to the Prince. It is not known when Mather Brown’s copy of the Hoppner portrait of Haydn was made, although it was acquired by the RSM in 1867.
Further literature:
- H.C. Robbins Landon, Haydn in England, 1791-1795 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983).
- H.C. Robbins Landon, The Collected Correspondence and London Notebooks of Joseph Haydn (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1959).
- Christopher Hogwood, Haydn’s visits to England (London: The Folio Society, 1980).
