Francis Seymour Haden

Sir Francis Seymour Haden was an English surgeon, born in Chelsea, London, on 16 September 1818 and died on 1 June 1910, who became better known as an etcher. The son of the doctor Charles Thomas Haden, he studied at University College London and at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he took his degree in 1840, and was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1842. With no art school or teacher, he studied the prints of Dürer, Lucas van Leyden and Rembrandt, and went on to lead the Etching Revival in Britain and to found the Society of Painter-Etchers, now the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, whose first president he was for thirty years. He was the first to catalogue Rembrandt's etchings chronologically and in states. He was also an ardent champion of earth to earth burial, writing a pamphlet on cremation in 1875 and a plea for legislation on the disposal of the dead in 1888, and he was knighted in 1894.