The celebrity painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, was a staunch advocate for the arts and famous for his enthusiasm for reviving British history painting on vast canvases in the first half of the nineteenth century.

He gifted his wooden palette to Birkbeck in gratitude for “opening their doors to him when every other institution had the moral cowardice to close them”, which is still on display in the Blue Corridor in Malet St.

Haydon became well known as a lecturer, teaching art at Birkbeck in 1835. His classes were popular, often attracting hundreds of people, including one in which he brought along a model to pose nude for the duration of his lecture on the subject of the nude in art. He campaigned vigorously for the wider appreciation of art, contending that governments had a responsibility to buy works of artistic merit and to allow the general public, as opposed to patrons and connoisseurs only, to view them.