with his attempt at the heroic in the form and action of Dentatus,
obliterated what he calls 'the abominable mass,' and breathed as if
relieved of a nuisance. Through Lord Mulgrave he obtained an order to
draw from the Marbles, and devoted the next three months to mastering
their secrets, and bringing his hand and mind into subjection to the
principles that they displayed. 'I rose with the sun,' he writes, with
the glow of his first enthusiasm still upon him, 'and opened my eyes
to the light only to be conscious of my high pursuit. I sprang from my
bed, dressed like one possessed, and passed the day, noon, and the
night, in the same dream of abstracted enthusiasm; secluded from the
world, regardless of its feelings, impregnable to disease, insensible
to contempt.' He painted his heads, figures, and draperies over and
over again, feeling that to obliterate was the only way to improve.
His studio soon filled with fashionable folk, who came to see the
'extraordinary picture painted by a young man who had never had the
advantages of foreign travel.' Haydon believed, with the simplicity of
a child, in all these flattering prophecies of glory and fame, and
imagined that the Academy would welcome with open arms so promising a
student, one, moreover, who had been trained in its own school. He
redoubled his efforts, and in March 1809, 'Dentatus' was finished.

'The production of this picture,' he naively explains, 'must and will
be considered as an epoch in English art. The drawing in it was
correct and elevated, and the perfect forms and system of the antique
were carried into painting, united with the fleshy look of everyday
life. The colour, light and shadow, the composition and the telling of
the story were complete.' His contemporaries did not form quite so
flattering an estimate of the work. It was badly hung, a fate to which
many an artist of three-and-twenty has had to submit, before and
since; but Haydon writes as if no such injustice had been committed