H
HADEN, Sir FRANCIS SEYMOUR (1818–1910), etcher and surgeon, the son of Charles Thomas Haden, M.D. (1786–1824), was born at 62 Sloane Street on 16 Sept. 1818. A biographical notice of his father by Dr. Thomas Alcock was prefixed to his work, 'Practical Observations on the Management and Diseases of Children,' published posthumously in 1827. His mother, Emma, was daughter of Samuel Harrison [q. v.], the vocalist, and was herself an excellent musician.
Haden received his general education at Derby School, Christ's Hospital, and University College, London, and continued his professional studies in the medical schools of the Sorbonne, Paris, and at Grenoble, where he acted as prosecteur in 1839, and, later, lecturer on surgical anatomy at the military hospital. In 1842 he became a member, and in 1857 a fellow, of the Royal College of Surgeons. From 1851 to 1867 he was honorary surgeon to the Department of Science and Art. He had settled in private practice at 62 Sloane Street in 1847, moving in 1878 to 38 Hertford Street, Mayfair. In addition to the labours of a large private practice, he found time for much public work in relation to surgical science, serving on the juries of the International Exhibitions of 1851 and 1862, and contributing in this capacity in 1862 an exhaustive report, remarkable for its championship of the operation of ovariotomy. He was consulting surgeon to the Chapel Royal, a vice-president of the obstetrical society of London, and one of the principal movers in the foundation of the Royal Hospital for Incurables in 1850. Throughout his life he maintained a vigorous campaign against cremation, as well as against certain abuses which had become more or less inseparable from the old-fashioned methods of burial, advocating a natural 'earth to earth' burial, which he effected by his invention of a papier-mâché coffin. He published on the subject several pamphlets, 'The Disposal of the Dead,' 'A Protest against Cremation,' 'Earth to Earth' (1875), and 'Cremation an Incentive to Crime' (2nd edit. 1892). Among his fellow practitioners he was noted for an instinctive power of diagnosis, due largely to a disciplined sense of vision. Much of his spare time in the evenings while a student in Paris was spent in the art schools, and quite apart from his purely artistic inclination he was always a staunch advocate of the use of drawing in training the hand and eye of the surgeon.
Haden sought relaxation from his professional work of surgeon, which he pursued till 1887, in the art and study of etching. His etched work, although technically that of an amateur, is the chief memorial of his life. Except for a few plates after Turner, and some family portraits after Wright of Derby, his work is entirely original. It includes a few portraits and figure studies, but is chiefly devoted to landscape. Here he was an artist of great truth and keenness of vision, and his best work shows a real sense of style, a true appreciation of the value of line, and a thorough command of an eminently virile technique. Most of his etchings, which number two hundred and fifty in all (Nos. 66 and 57 in Dr. Harrington's catalogue are in reality different states of a single plate), were done during the years of his greatest professional activity. He was not only assiduous in drawing and etching when in the country, but even on his professional rounds he was seldom without a plate in his pocket or in the carriage, ready to use the etching needle to record his impressions as another would a note-book.
Six of his plates, the records of an Italian journey, date as early as 1843–4, but there was an interval of fourteen years before he took up etching again in 1858. By that time Haden had come into close relations with James Abbott McNeill Whistler [q. v. Suppl. II], whose half-sister Dasha Delano Whistler, Haden married on 16 Oct. 1847. The etchings of Whistler and Haden bear traces of a mutual influence which is well exemplified in portraits by both (Harrington, No. 9; Wedmore, No. 25) of Lady Haden reading by lamplight. The two etchings were done on the same evening in 1858, the year in which Whistler published the thirteen prints of the 'French set.'
One half of Haden's etchings were produced in the decade succeeding 1859, sixty-eight being done in the two years 1864–5 alone. Then in 1877, when he was staying at Newton Manor with Sir John Charles Robinson, and afterwards travelling with Robinson in Spain, he completed his record
