Part 3

Still, there is a variety of qualities in Reynolds’s and Gainsborough’s pictures that we do not find, or expect to find, in those of Romney--a fact which must be taken into account in comparing the number of their respective portraits exhibited in 1867. The stream of popular taste steadily ebbed during the century following Sir Joshua’s death, and it is only of late years that Romney has been “discovered” and restored to public favour. A great deal of Romney’s present-day popularity I cannot help thinking is attributable as much to the delectable quality of his ladies’ faces as to the classic simplicity of treatment which makes them what they are.

Then, of course, there is Lady Hamilton, to whom, as we find Allan Cunningham asserting, many have imputed the chief charm of Romney’s best pictures. In these days it is certainly true that her name is inseparably associated with Romney’s art in the popular mind, and the latest addition to the bibliography of Romney is concerned with nothing but Lady Hamilton. Unfortunately for Romney’s reputation both inside and outside his painting-room, this lady’s fame has so filled the public ear with matters which are altogether distinct from the art of painting, that it is almost impossible to appreciate her influence upon Romney’s art in anything like its proper proportions. We are as it were between two fires--the glamour which she threw over the painter and the glamour which he threw over her; and our view of the matter, unless we are careful to screen our eyes, is likely to be too highly coloured for the ordinary purposes of criticism.

The broad fact seems to be that for nearly a decade the inspiration of Emma Lyon poured like sunlight into Romney’s studio, and although before it came he had for several years established his reputation and done some of his best work in portraiture, its withdrawal, in 1791, was the end of all that was happy or successful in his career. “His imagination was gone,” says Mr. Humphry Ward; “his health, for many years frail, became less robust than ever, and of his portraits and pictures painted after 1791, many exhibit signs of decaying powers.”

That he was exceedingly fond of her need not, of course, be doubted. How could it be otherwise? But is it any more necessary to dwell upon his purely personal relations with her than on those of Sir Joshua Reynolds with Kitty Fisher or Nelly O’Brien? For Reynolds, those two “professional beauties” were sitters, of whom the painter succeeded in painting several beautiful and accomplished portraits. For Romney, Emma Lyon was to some extent the embodiment of the Muse whom I have ventured to postulate as his guardian angel, when engaged in the perilous commerce of painting pretty and fashionable ladies. That she was also the veritable embodiment of all that was pleasing to the mortal eye in the shape of woman is at least equally certain; but unlike so many of her frail sisters, she was a remarkably accomplished and intelligent woman. “She performed both in the serious and comic to admiration,” writes Romney, in a letter describing an evening at Sir William Hamilton’s, “both in singing and acting. Her Nina surpasses everything I ever saw, and I believe as a piece of acting nothing ever surpassed it. The whole company were in an agony of sorrow. Her acting is simple, grand, terrible, and pathetic.”

In another letter, to Hayley in June 1791, he writes, “At present, and the greatest part of the summer, I shall be engaged in painting pictures from the divine lady. I cannot give her any other epithet, for I think her superior to all womankind. I have two pictures to paint of her for the Prince of Wales. She says she must see you.... She asked me if you would not write my life. I told her you had begun it. Then she said she hoped you would have much to say of her in the life, as she prided herself in being my model.” And again in the following month “I dedicate my time to this charming lady; there is a prospect of her leaving town with Sir William for two or three weeks. They are very much hurried at present, as everything is going on for their speedy marriage, and all the world following and talking of her, so that if she had not more good sense than vanity her brain must be turned.

“The pictures I have begun are Joan of Arc, a Magdalen, and a Bacchante, for the Prince of Wales,

and another I am to begin as a companion to the Bacchante. I am also to paint a picture of Constance for the Shakespeare Gallery.”

The extent of Romney’s obligations to her, simply as a model, may be gathered from a glance at Mr. Roberts’s Catalogue Raisonné of his work. Here we find forty-five different pictures of the fair Emma, a figure which is about doubled if we count the various versions painted of one and another--as a Bacchante, for example, no less than twelve separate canvases are enumerated. Nor does this catalogue probably include a good many sketches and studies which were left unfinished. Of the various characters in which he painted her, apart from pictures which were simply portraits, the list includes those of Alope, Ariadne, a Bacchante, Cassandra, Circe, Comedy, the Comic Muse, Contemplation, Euphrosyne, a Gipsy, Iphigenia, Joan of Arc, a Magdalen, Meditation, Miranda, Nature, a Nun, a Pythian Priestess, S. Cecilia, Sensibility, a Shepherdess, Sigismunda, the Spinstress. The Sempstress, it may be mentioned, was not painted from her, but from Miss Vernon.

Such a catalogue as this is, I suppose, unique in the annals of painting. Oddly enough it is paralleled in those of literature--if it be not thought too fanciful to quote the example of William Shakespeare. For fanciful as at first thought it may seem, it is, nevertheless, helpful to an understanding of the relations of the private life of each to his particular art.

George Romney, like Shakespeare, was born of humble parents in a remote country town. Dalton, in Lancashire, is further from London than Stratford, but as I do not pretend to draw the parallel too closely, I will confine myself to a short account of Romney’s circumstances only. He was born on December 15, 1734. His ancestors, yeomen of good repute, lived near Appleby, in Westmorland, but took refuge during the Civil Wars in the neighbouring county. His father was a joiner, which in those days included the trade of carpenter and cabinet-maker, and George was apprenticed to him. How and at what period the love of painting came upon him has not been clearly shown. Cumberland asserts that it was inspired by the cuts in the

_Universal Magazine_. Hayley says that he consumed the time of his fellow-workmen in sketching them in various attitudes, while John Romney states that Lionardo’s treatise on painting, illustrated by many fine engravings, was early in his hands. Cumberland describes him as “a child of nature who had never seen or heard of anything that could elicit his genius or urge him to emulation, and who became a painter without a prototype.” At nineteen, however, he was apprenticed for four years to a painter called Count Steele, who was practising in the neighbouring town of Kendal. During this time he fell in love with a young lady of some little fortune, Mary Abbot, and on October 14, 1756, he carried her across the border to Gretna Green and married her.

His precipitate marriage drew upon him the rebuke of his parents, but he vindicated himself with some firmness and skill. “If you consider everything deliberately,” he wrote, “you will find it to be the best affair that ever happened to me; because if I have fortune I shall make a better painter than I should otherwise have done, as it will be a spur to my application; and my thoughts being now still, and not obstructed by youthful follies, I can practise with more diligence and success than ever.”

According to Hayley, he soon perceived that his marriage was an obstacle to his studies; that he was ruined as an artist, and that he might bid farewell to all hopes of fame and glory, although he was devoting himself with all his might to his work. “The terror of precluding himself from those distant honours,” says Hayley--to whom, by-the-by, we are under no obligation to believe more than we wish--“by appearing in the world as a young married man, agitated the ambitious artist almost to distraction, and made him resolve very soon after his marriage, as he had no means of breaking the fetters which he wildly regarded as inimical to the improvement and exertion of his genius, to hide them as much as possible from his troubled fancy.”

This exordium of Hayley’s is, as it were, in the nature of a “preliminary announcement” of the separation between Romney and his wife, when five years later he resolved to try his fortune in London.

“In working rapidly and patiently at different places in the north, for a few years,” Hayley continues, “by painting heads as large as life at the price of two guineas or figures at whole length on a small scale for six guineas, he contrived to raise a sum amounting almost to a hundred pounds; taking thirty for his own travelling expenses, and leaving the residue to support an unoffending partner and two children, he set forth alone, without even a letter of recommendation, to try the chances of life in the metropolis.”

That was in 1762; and for a much longer period than Shakespeare, and with no occasional visits to his family, Romney worked in London and became more and more famous, until, as we have seen, his decline set in.

“The summer of 1799 came,” writes Allan Cunningham, “but Romney could neither enjoy the face of nature, nor feel pleasure in his studio and gallery. A visible mental languor sat upon his brow--not diminishing but increasing; he had laid aside his pencils; his swarm of titled sitters, whose smile in other days rendered passing time so agreeable, were moved off to a Lawrence, a Shee, or a Beechey; and thus left lonely and disconsolate among whole cartloads of paintings, which he had not the power to complete, his gloom and his weakness gathered and grew upon him.... In these moments his heart and his eye turned towards the north--where his son, a man affectionate and kind, resided; and where his wife, surviving the cold neglect and long estrangement of her husband, lived yet to prove the depth of a woman’s love, and show to the world that she would have been more worthy of appearing at his side, even when earls sat for their pictures, and Lady Hamilton was enabling him to fascinate princes with his Calypsos and Cassandras. Romney departed from Hampstead, and taking the northern coach arrived among his friends at Kendal in the summer of 1799. The exertion of travelling and the presence of her whom he once had warmly loved overpowered him; he grew more languid and more weak, and finding fireside happiness he resolved to remain where he was; he purchased a house and authorised the sale of that on Hampstead Hill.”

So much for the parallel as concerned the private life of either. But what about his art? Where in Shakespeare’s literary career are we to find anything comparable with the influence of Emma Lyon on Romney’s painting during the crowning decade of his accomplishment? I suggest as the answer, that during a similar period, of about the same duration, namely from about 1593 to 1603, we may trace a similar influence on the poet, which is embodied in a series of masterpieces numbering over a hundred, namely, most if not all, of the first hundred and twenty-five of “Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” They were all written to one person, and in such terms of art as have led others besides Alexander Dyce to suppose that they were really addressed to the poet’s muse rather than to any corporeal being. As in the case of Romney, the author has been maligned by the undiscerning vulgar for supposed deviations from the strict path of virtue in his relations with his friend. But for any one who has an understanding of the spirit of art there is nothing in either case to support the allegation. Had Shakespeare and Romney looked no farther than their own hearths for artistic inspiration, the world would have been the poorer: that is all.

* * * * *

Of Romney’s classical or historical pictures the world knows almost as little as it cares about them. “I have made many grand designs,” he himself wrote in 1794, “I have formed a system of original subjects, moral and my own, and I think one of the grandest that has been thought of--but nobody knows it.” Cunningham, after disposing shortly of his portraits, proceeds to state that the historical and domestic pictures, finished and unfinished, deserve a more minute examination; that they embrace a wide range of reading and observation and are numerous beyond all modern example. But with the exception of _Titania and her Indian Votaries_ and _Milton Dictating to his Daughters_, which were mentioned by Flaxman, and various fancy portraits of Lady Hamilton, he does not specify a single finished example. His explanation is that “for one finely finished there are five half done, and for five half done there are at least a dozen merely commenced on the canvas.”

So far as these canvases are concerned, there is no doubt that the majority of them have been destroyed; but there are still in existence a large quantity of drawings and sketches on paper, both in pencil and in India ink, for classical compositions. As many of these are probably rough ideas for his lost pictures, it is perhaps worth mentioning a few of the subjects enumerated by Cunningham among the unfinished productions, which may help to identify the sketches, besides, as Cunningham says, “showing the range of his mind, and also his want of patience to render his works worthy of admission to public galleries.” The principal are as follows: _King Lear Asleep_, _King Lear Awake_, _Ceyx and Alcyone_, _The Death of Niobe’s Children_, _The Cumean Sibyl Foretelling the Destiny of Aeneas_, _Electra and Orestes at the Tomb of Agammemnon_, _Thetis Supplicating Jupiter_, _Thetis Comforting Achilles_, _Damon and Musidora_, _Homer Reciting his Verses_, _David and Saul_, _Macbeth and Banquo_, _The Descent of Odin_, _The Ghost of Clytemnestra_, _Eurydice vanishing from Orpheus_, _Harpalice_, _A Thracian Princess defending her wounded Father_, _Antigone with the Corpse of Polynices_, _A Witch displaying her Magical Powers_, _Resuscitation by Force of Magic_, _Doll Tearsheet_, _Cupid and Psyche_.

Besides these there are a number of portrait sketches, which though not so numerous, are much more charming, in spite of their being exceedingly rough and slight. They must have been simply notes, and can seldom have been intended for more than fixing an idea in the painter’s mind. I have as many as a dozen in my own possession which I have picked up here and there in the dealers’ portfolios, and there are probably a good number of them in existence. Rough as they are, they are certainly deserving of more attention than is usually accorded to them; for though Romney never seems to have enjoyed the process of committing a portrait to paper as Gainsborough did, these business-like notes of pose and chiaroscuro give us a good insight into his methods of setting to work. Perhaps the taste of a future generation will prefer the rough-hewn idea of a great portrait painter to the finished achievement of Benwell or Buck in little.

INDEX

Boydell, Alderman, 26

Cathcart, Lord, 35

Chamberlin, Mason, 2

Cimabue, 5, 30, 34

Copley, John Singleton, 8

Copley’s _Death of Chatham_, 9

Correggio, 34

Cumberland, 23, 46

Cunningham, Allan, 13, 19, 41

Currie, Mrs. Mark, 3, 31, 35, 36

Dalton, 46

Exhibition of National Portraits, 40

Flaxman, John, R.A., 15, 30, 31, 32, 34

Fuseli, Henry, R.A., 9

Gainsborough, Thomas, 11, 16, 17, 28, 40

Garrick, David, 23, 24

Giotto, 30, 34

Hamilton, Lady, 13, 41-43 influence on Romney’s painting, 51 Romney’s portraits of, 45

Hayley, William, 13, 25, 47 influence over Romney, 14, 20

Highmore, 23

Hogarth, William, 23

Holbein, Hans, 5

Kauffmann, Angelica, 9

Michelangelo, 30, 34

Northcote, James, R.A., 7

Pictures by George Romney _Bacchante_, 44 _Constance_, 45 _Joan of Arc_, 44 _John Wesley_, 40 _Lady Gower and her Children_, 20 _Lady Hamilton_, 3, 35 _Louisa, Countess of Mansfield_, 35, 36 _Magdalen_, 44 _Milton dictating to his Daughters_, 52 _Miss Hannah Milnes_, 35 _Mr. and Mrs. Lindow_, 29 _Mr. Leigh and his Family_, 23 _Mrs. Jordan_, 35 _Mrs. Yates as The Tragic Muse_, 25 _The Dream of Atossa_, 31 _The Parson’s Daughter_, 3, 31 “_The Triumphs of Temper_,” 13 _The Warren Family_, 21 _Titania and her Indian Votaries_, 52 “_Tragic Muse_,” 26

Raphael, 34

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 4, 5, 7, 11, 16, 28, 34, 40

Roberts, Mr., Catalogue Raisonné, 36, 45

Romney, George, birth of, 46 apprenticed to joinery, 46 apprenticeship to Count Steele, 47 classicism, 30 conscientiousness, 28 distaste for portrait painting, 4 first full-length portrait of a lady, 26 influence of Hayley upon, 14 in London, 49 letters to Hayley, 44 life of, by William Hayley, 13 marriage to Mary Abbot at Gretna Green, 47 place among portrait painters, 38 portraits compared with those of Reynolds and Gainsborough, 18 prices obtained for pictures, 39 principal pictures, list of, 53, 54 return to Kendal, 50 separation from his wife, 48 simplicity of treatment, 27

Romney, Rev. John, 13, 21, 29, 47

Shakespeare Gallery, 45

Shakespeare, William, 46

Thurlow, Lord Chancellor, 38

Vandyck, 5

Velasquez, 5

Vernon, Lord, 22

Walpole, Horace, 12

Ward, Mr. Humphry, 23, 42

West, Benjamin, 7

West’s “_Pylades and Orestes_,” 7

Wilson, Richard, Founder of the English School of Landscape, 6

PRINTED AT THE BALLANTYNE PRESS LONDON

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

trival, pretty, or banal=> trivial, pretty, or banal {pg 20}

scarlet waistcoast=> scarlet waistcoat {pg 24}