Francis Seymour Hayden was born in London on 16 September 1818. His father Charles Thomas Hayden was a doctor and music lover. Francis was educated at University College School and University College, London. He also studied at the Sorbonne, Paris, 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 out to Italy and produced his first sketches from nature. Alongside his distinguished career as a surgeon, Hayden followed the art of original etching with such vigour, that he became not only the foremost British exponent of that art, but was the principal cause of its revival in England. In his youth, Hayden had studied the portfolios of prints belonging to an old second-hand dealer named Love, who had a shop in Bunhill Row, London’s old Quaker quarter. These he would carry home, and arranging the prints in chronological order, study the works of Dürer, Lucas van Leyden 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 in 1877, he endeavoured to give a just idea of Rembrandt’s work, separating the true from the false, and giving altogether 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). Notwithstanding his study of the Old Masters of his art, Haden’s plates are as individual as any artists and are particularly noticeable for his fine treatment of landscape subjects, free and open in line, clear and well divided in mass, and full of a noble and dignified style. Even when working from a picture, Hayden’s 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 black and white interpretative work. 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 beautiful, is his 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, the artist said, 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 art. A catalogue of his works was commenced by Sir William Drake and completed by Mr N Harrington (1880). By his efforts and perseverance, aided by the secretarial capacities of Sir W R Drake, he founded the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers. As president, he ruled that body with a strong hand from its first beginnings in 1880. Interestingly, history credits Hayden with inventing the practice of charging extra for a signature, than for an unsigned print. In 1883 he travelled to America and lectured at the University of Syracuse in New York. In his later years, Sir Francis began to practise the art of mezzotint engraving, with a measure of the same success that he had already achieved in pure etching and in dry-point. Odd as it may seem, Hayden was brother-in-law of the artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who did rather well out of the relationship. When Whistler was broke, Hayden helped him out. If he fell ill, Hayden hastened to his Paris bedside. When Whistler took up etching, Hayden volunteered technical advice and his knowledge of the market. Sir Francis was a supporter of the natural burial movement which advocated ‘earth to earth burial’ which he believed was a less gruesome alternative to cremation or the slow putrefaction of encased corpses. The movement was part of the short-lived cremation controversy of the 1870s. Sir Francis died in 1910. In 1923 Malcolm Salaman published his book The Etchings of Sir Francis Seymour Hayden, PRE.