The Royal Academy would have none of him, and he attacked it furiously at point of the bayonet. That the Royal Academy hampered the progress of Art, stifled genius, crushed out originality was true then as some assert it is true now; but the Royal Academicians did not relish being told these truths by one just growing to manhood; and it was impolitic in Haydon to set those in arms against him who posed and were regarded as authorities on Art. Nothing pleased him but vast canvases. On 24 July, 1825, he refused a commission of five hundred guineas from Sir John Broughton to paint a small picture of Edward the Black Prince distinguishing an ancestor on the field of Poitiers, lest it should interfere with his carrying out of one of his unsaleable monstrous canvases. The pictures that sold were portraits. “My whole soul and body raise the gorge at portrait,” he wrote in his diary. When he was engaged to do a family piece, he says that it gave him a nasty taste in his mouth. Yet, as his great subjects would not sell, he was forced to paint portraits; and he writes, 24 July, 1824: “For these two months, having at last devoted myself to portraits, I have enjoyed tranquillity, luxury, quiet, and peace, and have maintained my family with respectability.” And then he bursts forth into scorn and loathing of the subject. Indeed, he says he gloried in doing portraits badly, because it was unworthy of him and his high ideals. “I have an exquisite gratification in painting portraits wretchedly.” 27 March, 1843: “The moment I touch a great canvas I think I see my Creator smiling on all my efforts. The moment I do mean things for subsistence I feel as if He had turned His back, and, what’s more, I believe it.” 21 January, 1842: “There is nothing like a large canvas. Let me be penniless, helpless, hungry, thirsty, croaking or fierce, the blank, even space of a large canvas restores me to happiness, to anticipations of glory. My heart expands, and I stride my room like a Hercules.” Borrow, in his _Lavengro_, has devoted a chapter to a visit to Haydon. A commission had been given to the artist to paint the portrait of the Mayor of Norwich. He was only reconciled to the idea when it was suggested to him that he should represent the mayor as issuing from under a Norman archway.