In 1843–44, with his friends Duval, Le Cannes and Colonel Guibout, he travelled to Italy and made his first sketches and six etchings from nature. Haden attended no art school and had no art teachers, but between 1845 and 1848 he studied intently, the portfolios of prints belonging to a second-hand dealer named Love, who had a shop in Bunhill Row, the old Quaker quarter of London. Arranging the prints in chronological order, he studied in particular, the works of the great original engravers, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas van Leyden and Rembrandt.