945. EBB to Benjamin Robert Haydon
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 316–317.
50 Wimpole Street.
[mid-] April 1842. [1]
Permit me Sir, to thank you for your kind attention in sending me your interesting & animated treatise on the subject of fresco painting [2] —an attention of which I am abundantly sensible,—though ignorant of practical art & shut out from all especial revelations of the angel Uriel. [3] But I can understand the advantage the glorious advantage of a new (old) grand dialect for the use of the Imaginative faculty .. & how, the most imaginative artists being naturally most earnest in aspiration toward such sufficient expression, Mr Haydon finds himself in heart & voice first in the pursuit. May he find besides success & victory—for the sake of the Houses of Parliament—for the sake of British art, & for the sake of his own fame in its connection.
I count it among my deprivations that I was not able to see him when he did us the kindness of calling here some time ago—but my health unhappily for me, was & is weaker than my will.
It is not possible to close this note without saying that I heard from our dear mutual friend Miss Mitford, my very precious friend Miss Mitford, a few days since,—& that she speaks with something more [of] hope of the infirm state of her father than her anxieties have suffered her to do for a long while past–
I remain Sir
Your obliged & faithful servt
Elizabeth B Barrett.
Publication: EBB-BRH, pp. 1–2.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. This letter falls between 941, in which EBB mentions having just received Haydon’s gift, and 947, in which she tells Miss Mitford that she has written to him.
2. Haydon’s diary entry for 4 March 1842 recorded that he “Lectured at the Royal Institution on Fresco & made a great hit” (Pope, V, 134). The lecture was published with the title Thoughts on the Relative Value of Fresco and Oil Painting as Applied to the Architectural Decorations of the Houses of Parliament.
(In this note, and some others relating to the series of letters to Haydon, we have drawn on material researched by Dr. Willard Bissell Pope for his Invisible Friends: The Correspondence of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett and Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1842–1845. We here record our debt to his scholarship.)
3. A reference to Haydon’s first attempt at fresco, on the wall of one of his rooms, seen by Arabel and Septimus Moulton-Barrett, and also by Miss Mitford, in October 1841. (For their reaction to it, see letter 861.)
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