Sir Francis Seymour Haden (16 September 1818 - 1 June 1910), was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 surgeon

Surgery

Surgery is an ancient medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a patient to investigate and/or treat a pathological condition such as disease or injury, or to help improve bodily function or appearance.An act of performing surgery may be called a surgical...

, best known as an etcher.

He was born in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, his father, Charles Thomas Haden, being a well-known doctor and lover of music. He was educated at Derby School

Derby School

Derby School was a school in Derby in the English Midlands from 1160 to 1989. It had an almost continuous history of education of over eight centuries. For most of that time it was a grammar school for boys. The school became co-educational and comprehensive in 1974 and was closed in 1989...

, Christ's Hospital

Christ's Hospital

Christ's Hospital is an English coeducational independent day and boarding school with Royal Charter located in the Sussex countryside just south of Horsham in Horsham District, West Sussex, England...

, and University College, London, and also studied at the Sorbonne

University of Paris

The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...

, Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, where he took his degree in 1840. He was admitted as a member of the College of Surgeons in London in 1842.

In 1843-1844, with his friends Duval, Le Cannes and Colonel Guibout, he travelled in Italy and made his first sketches from nature. Haden attended no art school and had no art teachers, but between 1845 and 1848 he studied portfolios of prints belonging to a second-hand dealer named Love, who had a shop in Bunhill Row, the old Quaker quarter of London. Arranging the prints in chronological order, he studied the works of the great original engravers, Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer was a German painter, printmaker, engraver, mathematician, and theorist from Nuremberg. His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance ever since...

, Lucas van Leyden

Lucas van Leyden

Lucas van Leyden , also named either Lucas Hugensz or Lucas Jacobsz, was a Dutch engraver and painter, born and mainly active in Leiden...

 and Rembrandt. These studies, besides influencing his original work, led to his important monograph on the etched work of Rembrandt. By lecture and book, and with the aid of the memorable exhibition at the Burlington Fine Arts Club

Burlington Fine Arts Club

The Burlington Fine Arts Club was a London gentlemen's club, now dissolved, which was established in 1866 and was disbanded in 1952. It was based at 17 Savile Row....

 in 1877, he tried to give a true reflection of Rembrandt's work, giving a nobler idea of the master's mind by taking away from the list of his works many dull and unseemly plates that had long been included in the lists. His reasons were founded upon the results of a study of the master's works in chronological order, and are clearly expressed in his monograph, The Etched Work of Rembrandt critically reconsidered, privately printed in 1877, and in The Etched Work of Rembrandt True and False (1895).

Haden's printmaking was invigorated by his much younger brother-in-law, James Whistler, at the Haden home in Sloane Street in 1855. A press was installed there and for a while Haden and Whistler collaborated on a series of etchings of the Thames. The relationship and project did not last.

Haden followed the art of original etching with such vigour that he became not only the foremost British exponent of that art but brought about its revival in England. His strenuous efforts and perseverance, aided by the secretarial ability of Sir WR Drake, resulted in the foundation of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers. As president he ruled the society with a strong hand from its first beginnings in 1880.

Notwithstanding his study of the old masters of his art, Haden's own plates were very individual, and are particularly noticeable for a fine original treatment of landscape subjects, free and open in line, clear and well divided in mass, and full of a noble and dignified style of his own. Even when working from a picture his personality dominates the plate, as for example in the large plate he etched after J.M.W. Turner's "Calais Pier," which is a classical example of what interpretative work can do in black and white. Of his original plates, more than 250 in number, one of the most notable was the large "Breaking up of the Agamemnon."
An early plate, rare and most beautiful, is "Thames Fisherman". "Mytton Hall" is broad in treatment, and a fine rendering of a shady avenue of yew trees leading to an old manor-house in sunlight. "Sub Tegmine" was etched in Greenwich Park in 1859; and "Early Morning--Richmond", full of the poetry and freshness of the hour, was done, according to Haden, actually at sunrise. One of the rarest and most beautiful of his plates is "A By-Road in Tipperary"; "Combe Bottom" is another; and "Shere Mill Pond" (both the small study and the larger plate), "Sunset in Ireland," "Penton Hook," "Grim Spain" and "Evening Fishing, Longparish," are also notable examples of his genius. A catalogue of his works was begun by Sir William Drake and completed by Harrington in 1880. During later years Haden began to practise the sister art of mezzotint

Mezzotint

Mezzotint is a printmaking process of the intaglio family, technically a drypoint method. It was the first tonal method to be used, enabling half-tones to be produced without using line- or dot-based techniques like hatching, cross-hatching or stipple...

 engraving, with a measure of the same success that he had already achieved in pure etching and in dry-point. Some of his mezzotints are: "An Early Riser," a stag seen through the morning mists, "Grayling Fishing" and "A Salmon Pool on the Spey." He also produced some remarkable drawings of trees and park-like country in charcoal.

Other books by Haden not already mentioned are:

• Etudes a l'eau forte (Paris, 1865)
• About Etching (London, 1878-1879)
• The Art of the Painter-Etcher (London, 1890)
• The Relative Claims of Etching and Engraving to rank as Fine Arts and to be represented in the Royal Academy (London, 1883)
• Address to Students of Winchester School of Art (Winchester, 1888)
• Cremation: a Pamphlet (London, 1875)
• The Disposal of the Dead, a Plea for Legislation (London, 1888).

As the last two indicate, he was an ardent champion of a system of "earth to earth" burial.

Among numerous distinctions he received the Grand Prix, Paris, in 1889 and 1900, and was made a member of the Institut de France, Académie des Beaux-Arts and Société des Artistes Français. He was knighted in 1894. He married in 1847 a sister of the artist James McNeill Whistler

James McNeill Whistler

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger...

; and his elder son, Francis Seymour Haden (b. 1850), had a distinguished career as a member of the government in Natal Colony from 1881 to 1893, being made a C.M.G. in 1890.