Curtius Leaping into the Gulf
Artist: Benjamin Robert Haydon
A horseman throws himself into a dark chasm, his white horse rearing above the void. The scene is ancient Roman legend, painted by the nineteenth-century British history painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, a man whose own life ended in catastrophe. This draft explores the painting's visible drama and the story it tells, and asks what it means when an artist's subject echoes his own fate.