Betty in the Garden

Benjamin Haughton worked in the west of England and painted its landscape with a restraint that keeps him well outside the period’s more theatrical tendencies. Moorland, coastal light, fields under changing weather, handled in soft tonal ranges. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and in provincial galleries, and spent time in Cornwall, where the artists’ colonies at Newlyn and St Ives had made painting outdoors a normal practice rather than an experiment. The reputation never travelled far beyond Britain and the biographical record is thin. What survives is a body of quiet landscape painting that rewards looking at the paint rather than the subject, and which has been steadily reassessed as interest in British regional painting has grown.