Eighteenth Century British Portraiture

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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The third great English portrait-painter of the eighteenth century was George Romney, who never exhibited at the Royal Academy, and all his life was hostile to that institution and to its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Romney was born at Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, in 1734, when Reynolds was a boy of eleven and Gainsborough a child of seven. He was one of eleven children, and his father was a man of many occupations—farmer, builder, cabinet-maker, and dealer—and little prosperous in anything he undertook. George Romney consequently had his education neglected: at eleven years old he was helping his father in the workshop, and there he displayed precocious ability in drawing portraits of the workmen and other people. When he was twenty he made acquaintance of a vagabond artist named Christopher Steele, who journeyed from place to place making portraits, and in 1755 this man secured Romney as his pupil and took him with him on his travels. In the following year Romney fell ill with a fever and was tenderly nursed by his landlady’s daughter, a domestic servant named Mary Abbott, and being a highly-strung romantic youth Romney married this girl in the first burst of his gratitude, and later found her utterly unsuited to be his mate. Steele meanwhile had settled at York and summoned Romney to join him there as soon as he was well enough, and since he was not earning enough to keep a wife Mrs Romney had to go back to service when her husband rejoined the man to whom he was apprenticed.

There was little good that Steele, a mediocre artist and a loose liver, could teach Romney, and their association was more profitable to the older than the younger man, and after a year or two in bondage at York, Romney managed to purchase his freedom, and he then made a home for his wife at Kendal. With this town as his headquarters, he rambled about the Lake Country painting heads at £2 2s. each and small full lengths at £6 6s., till in 1762 he had at last managed to save a hundred pounds.

Romney was now twenty eight, and he felt that if ever he was to make his fortune by his art he must seek it in London. So giving £70 to his wife, with the remaining £30 he came to the capital, where he at once competed for a prize offered by the Society of Arts for an historical picture on ‘The Death of Wolfe.’ Romney was at first awarded a prize of fifty guineas for his version of this theme, but later the judges reversed their verdict and awarded the fifty guineas to John Hamilton Mortimer (1741-79), a young friend of Richard Wilson and Reynolds, and gave Romney only a consolation prize of twenty five guineas. Romney, not unnaturally, believed this reversal of the first judgment to be the result of favoritism, and to to the end of his life he thought that it had been brought about by Reynolds, who had been actuated by fear of a rival. In 1766 Romney again gained a premium for his ‘Death of King Edward’ from the Society of Arts, to which he was now admitted a member, and henceforward he exhibited regularly at the Society’s exhibitions, but always held aloof from the Academy. In 1767 he paid a visit to his wife and two daughters at Kendal, and returning alone to London soon established himself in public favor, and in the early ‘seventies he was making over a thousand a year by his profession. He thought the time had now come when he should visit Italy, and in March 1773 he set off for that country in the company of a brother artist, Ozias Humphrey (1742-1810), who afterwards became a famous miniature-painter. At Rome, Romney separated himself from his fellow traveler and led a hermit’s life, shunning the society of his compatriots, and giving his whole time to work and study. In 1775 he made his way back to England via Venice and Parma, studying with advantage the work of Correggio in the latter city, and reaching London in the month of July. Greatly improved now in his coloring and confident in his increased knowledge and power, Romney boldly took the house and studio of Francis Cotes, R.A (1725-70), who had been one of the chief of the older portrait-painters, at 32 Cavendish Square, and there seriously entered into competition with Reynolds. Gainsborough, it will be remembered, did not come to London till 1779, so that Romney, though the younger man, was the first formidable rival that Reynolds had to endure. Charging £15 15s. for head life-size, Romney soon found himself surrounded by sitters, and Reynolds was alarmed at the way in which his practice for a time was diminished by the painter to whom he contemptuously referred as ‘the man in Cavendish Square’. Later Romney had so many commissions that he was able to put up his prices, but even so he received only about 80 guineas for the full-length portraits which now fetch many thousands of pounds when they are sold by auction at Christie’s. When Reynolds died he left a fortune of £80000 earned by his brush, and though Romney was not successful to this extent he made a good living, his income in the year 1785 being £3635.

But Romney was never a mere money-grubber, and when at the age of forty-eight he first met his most famous sitter, the dazzlingly beautiful Emma Lyon, known to history as Lady Hamilton, he was so fascinated by her extraordinary personality, that time after time he refused all kinds of wealthy sitters in order that he might continue uninterruptedly to paint the lovely Emma. In 1882 the future Lady Hamilton was a mere girl of twenty or twenty one, living under the protection of Charles Grevile, who four years later—when he was in money difficulties—heartlessly handed her over to his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, who treated her more kindly and honorably. For five years Romney painted this fascinating creature continually in a variety of characters, and though gossip soon busied itself making scandal out of their relations, there is no evidence that the painter’s affection for her was anything but platonic. Of his many paintings of her, one of the most charming, the ‘Lady Hamilton’ is in the National Portrait Gallery.

In the art of George Romney there is a peculiar feminine quality which gives an extraordinary winsomeness, almost a pathos, to his paintings of frail women. There is a paternal tenderness rather than the passion of a lover in his paintings of Emma Hamilton and of another famous beauty, Mrs Robinson, known as ‘Perdita’. Romney’s beautiful portrait of the last in the Wallace Collection was done while this gifted actress was under the protection of the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV. But that royal rascal soon tired of her, and at the age of twenty four she had already been abandoned by ‘the first gentleman in Europe’. When he sent her away the Prince gave her a bond for £20000; but he never paid it, and ‘Perdita’ Robinson died in 1800, poor and paralysed.

Nobody has yet discovered who was the original of Romney’s most famous masterpiece, ‘The Parson’s Daughter’, but we may imagine that his beautiful creature, with a gentle melancholy behind her smile, was also one of the frail sisterhood to which both Lady Hamilton and Mrs Robinson belonged. The extraordinary sweetness and simplicity of Romney’s portraiture of women has the same tender reverence for the sex that we find in ‘The Vicar of Wakefield,’ and the peculiar winningness of Romney is perhaps best described by placing him as the Goldsmith of English painting.

Though he never brought his wife and family to London—where it is probable that they would have felt ill at ease in a sphere to which they were not accustomed—Romney supported them in comfort, and when after years of hard work in London his health broke down, he went back to his wife at Kendal. She received him without reproaches, and under her affectionate care the tired, worn-out genius ‘sank gently into second childhood and the grave’. He died at Kendal on November 15, 1802.

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