Strange it is that until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Romney revival began, fostered by the "Old Masters' Exhibitions" and auction sales, his fame had suffered an almost total eclipse. His portraits were hidden in private collections, the National Gallery set had not been acquired, and nobody cared about his heroic and historical cartoons and studies, at Cambridge and elsewhere.
The eclipse of the fame of Romney is no doubt partly due to the fact that he never exhibited at the Royal Academy, which in those days meant that "outsiders," so far as the public was concerned, were truly in outer darkness. When Romney retired from contact with the fashionable world, with which he never associated himself except as a painter; when he forsook his disastrous building experiments at Hampstead, for the living death (of his later years) at Kendal, he passed out of public life. His portraits ceased to be a topic. There were no weekly art columns in newspapers to fan the embers of his fame; the National Gallery was not founded, and the age of illustrated essays on private collections had not dawned.
The pages of the Diaries record, as I have already said, about nine thousand sittings in less than twenty years—a colossal labour; but some of the portraits were never finished, others have been lost or stolen. He kept no Diary until he had settled in Cavendish Square in 1775, after his journey to Italy. Before that period Romney had painted hundreds of pictures of which but scanty records remain. A few examples may still be found in the houses of the descendants of the original owners around Kendal.
Forty-five portraits of Lady Hamilton are recorded in Messrs. Ward and Roberts' Catalogue Raisonné, sixteen illustrations of Shakespeare, two of Milton, and over fifty miscellaneous and Fancy subjects. In the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge are a number of Pictorial Designs and studies presented by the Rev. George Romney in 1817, and at the Liverpool Royal Institution are eighteen cartoons, presented in 1823.
It would be unjust to call these historical and heroic subjects a monument of misdirected effort; but if Romney's claim to fame rested upon them, he would be of less account even than West and Fuseli.
His ardour was indefatigable, but it often spent itself when the novelty of beginning a sketch or portrait had worn off. In reading, too, his quick imagination soon flagged. At the end of one act, even of one scene, of Shakespeare's, he was ready to begin his picture. "The more he painted," says Hayley, "the greater was his flow of spirits." A friend surprised him one night working at an "Accusation of Susannah by the two Elders" by lamplight. It was never finished. Late in life he conceived a Gargantuan scheme of founding a Milton Gallery which should rival Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery.
The most attractive of his fanciful subjects is "Shakespeare nursed by Tragedy and Comedy," perhaps because Lady Hamilton was the model for Comedy (not in person; she was in Naples at the time), and Romney's brush was always inspired when he painted her adorable face. Shakespeare—a robust, nude babe—sits on a cradle in the landscape holding a flageolet, to the accompaniment of endearments from the pretty Tragedy and Comedy ladies. The least attractive, indeed the silliest, is the "Shipwreck," an early work engraved in Hayley's Life. A huddle of exaggeration and emphasis, it has all the vices of the melodramatic heroic pictures of the period.
Romney had some talent as a musician, and as a boy he debated whether he should be a musician or a painter. Cumberland records that once he heard the painter perform on his own home-made violin in a room hung with his own pictures—"a singular coincidence of arts in the person of one man."
Reviewing his life, I seem to see him drawing, like Paganini on a memorable occasion, exquisite strains from one string only—Romney of the one string—a fantasia on the beauty of fair and fragile women, pretty and graceful children, and delicate-visaged men, the sweetest sounds coming when he extemporised in praise of Emma, the "divine lady" who came into his life when he was forty-eight, and who renewed his youth.