Design and Art Australia Online

illustrator, cartoonist and writer, was born on 26 August 1822 at Heavitree, Devon, second son of a retired naval paymaster, Samuel Haydon, who supervised his sons’ education and developed their artistic talents. George’s elder brother, Samuel James Bouverie Haydon (1815-91), became a noted sculptor. George himself was apprenticed to the architect Charles Hedgeland at Exeter in 1837, but terminated his articles after twenty-one months and set out for the 'South Seas’. He sailed in the Theresa to Port Phillip, beginning the first of his diaries in March 1840. He arrived at Melbourne in July, where he worked in a bookshop and designed buildings (particularly terraced cottages) as clerk to the architect Thomas Price.

Haydon sketched for the newspapers and supplemented his income by holding private drawing classes at his shop; he moved to larger premises in Lonsdale Street in 1841. He became well known for his sketches, that of Melbourne in 1840 being widely reproduced when featured with a later engraving of Melbourne in the Australian Sketcher of 10 July 1875. Many of his sketches of Aboriginal life were sold to the illustrated papers or as souvenirs to send to Britain for 10s 6d each. A surviving pencil portrait of a man is signed and dated 1842 (Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, State Library of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania).

In 1843 Haydon moved to the Western Port coastal stations, staying with squatter friends. For six months he and a friend lived in isolation on French Island burning mangroves for barilla, an unsuccessful commercial venture. In about April 1844 he joined G.A. Robinson , chief protector of the Aborigines, as camp artist (for a salary of £2) on a trail-blazing expedition to East Gippsland. At the Victorian settlement he was employed designing buildings before meeting up with friends who took him on a swanning expedition in Western Port, his last adventure before returning to England in the Abberton . He left Melbourne on 15 January 1845.

Back at Exeter Haydon became an advocate of emigration, giving public lectures and publishing his Five Years’ Experience in Australia Felix (Exeter and London 1846), which drew on George Arden’s Latest Information with regard to Australia Felix rather than his own adventures. He then worked on a novel, The Australian Emigrant, a Rambling Story, Containing as much Fact as Fiction (London 1854), in which his own adventures and colonial acquaintances appeared, thinly disguised. His artistic interests had to be fitted in with his career in hospital administration and the law. He was steward of the Devon Lunatic Asylum at Exminster in 1849-53 and of Bridewell and Bethlehem hospitals in 1853-59. In 1865 he was called to the Bar at the Middle Temple. He died at his home, Ettrick, Putney Lower Common, on 9 November 1891.

As an artist, Haydon’s work falls into two periods. The early formative Australian period is mainly interesting for historical reasons. He made the 'first bold start at introducing the fine arts into Victoria as a humanizing agent’, said his friend Henry Hainsselin when describing his drawing classes of 1844, and he left a pictorial record, sometimes comic, of the early settlement and Aboriginal life in Port Phillip. His sketchbooks for this period (R.B. Smyth Collection, La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Vic (La Trobe)) are still unpublished. The illustrations to his two Australian books, although based on his sketches, were redrawn by artist friends; Charles Risdon engraved Five Years’ Experience and Watts Phillips The Australian Emigrant . Haydon’s view of the anchorage at the bottom of William and Queen streets, Melbourne, with the brig Henty in port (c.1840), published in the Australasian Sketcher on 10 July 1875, was subsequently worked up into an oil painting by Nellie McGlinn (La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Victoria).

The second or 'Bedlam’ period saw Haydon develop as a cartoonist and illustrator in his own right. He joined the Langham Sketching Club, a British offshoot of the Artists Society, whose members met every Friday night to draw a set subject. In 1860 he illustrated Lady Julia Lockwood’s Instinct or Reason , a book of animal tales for children, and in 1868 the privately printed The Surprising Adventures of Three Men . Haydon’s style was influenced by his friend George Cruikshank who shared his interest in mental asylums and temperance. Through his friendship with Charles Keene and John Leech many of his sketches appeared in the London Punch . Haydon’s literary and artistic circle included George Augustus Henry Sala and Roger Acton as well as Samuel Phelps, the actor.

Haydon married Clarissa, daughter of Joseph Risdon and sister of his friend Charles, at Langtree, Devon, on 20 December 1851. They had four sons and one daughter. His two great interests outside his art were the Volunteer Movement and angling. He took up the temperance cause in Melbourne and was a health enthusiast, although fond of pipe-smoking. Physically and mentally 'a large man’, his superb torso was sketched by Hainsselin in the 1840s; Keene’s study The Gigantic Angler in Punch 's almanac for 1885 was said to be the best likeness of him appearing in that magazine.

Writers:

Gunson, Niel

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011