Francis Hayman (1708 – 1776)

• Was an English painter and illustrator.
• Hayman became one of the founding members of the Royal Academy, and later its first librarian.
• Born in Exeter, Devon.
• Hayman begun his artistic career as a scene painter in London's Drury Lane theatre.
• A versatile artist influenced by the French Rococo style, he achieved some note during the 1740s through decorative paintings executed for the supper boxes at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in London.
• Hayman was also a successful portraitist and history painter.
• Combining some of these, he contributed 31 pictures to a 1744 edition of Shakespeare's plays by Sir Thomas Hanmer, and later portrayed many leading contemporary actors in Shakespearean roles, including David Garrick as Richard III (1760).
• He also illustrated Pamela, a novel by Samuel Richardson, Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Tobias Smollett's translation of Don Quixote.
• His pupils included Mason Chamberlin, Nathaniel Dance-Holland, Thomas Seton and Lemuel Francis Abbott.
• He was also a strong influence on Thomas Gainsborough.
• With Joshua Reynolds, Hayman was actively involved in the formation of the Society of Artists, a forerunner of the Royal Academy, during the early 1760s.
• Hayman died in 1776 and was buried in an unmarked grave in St Anne's Church, Soho.
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