The names of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Raeburn, Romney, and Hoppner are universally known, and many of their pictures, not always the best examples, are familiar; yet how few Britons have any idea of the chronological life-work of these masters. Their pictures in our public galleries are chance acquisitions, sometimes representative, often mere byways of their achievement.
Romney was an unequal painter. A classification of his achievement in order of merit would begin with the score or so of masterpieces, and dwindle downwards through his good, fair, poor, and bad pictures. There is no other word but bad for such productions as "The Shipwreck" and "The Infant Shakespeare surrounded by the Passions"; and if bad be an unfair description of "Newton Displaying the Prism," it is certainly a poor picture, although better than "Milton Dictating 'Paradise Lost.'" I have only seen a photograph of "Newton Displaying the Prism," but Redgrave, who examined the picture in the early sixties, describes it as poor in drawing, dirty and hot in colouring, and weak and common-place in treatment.
Romney stands or falls by his portraits and portrait groups, by the score or so of masterpieces that he painted better than he knew. These are the true "great art," the presentment through the eyes of temperament and training of the thing seen, that he was always striving to escape from in his pursuit of a false "great art," which he struggled to approach through the portals of literature guided by other eyes and other brains.
The inequality of Romney was shown at the 1907 Old Masters' Exhibition at Burlington House. In the six contributions from his brush, or ascribed to him, there was one superb example, the second Mrs. Lee Acton; one good example, the first Mrs. Lee Acton, and one bad example, the hard and discordant sketch of Edward Wortley Montagu. The muddy portrait of a "Lady in a White Dress," and the dull and common painting of the Rev. Thomas Carwardine, although not as bad as the Edward Montagu, were indeed poor Romneys. One only had to turn from the "Lady in a White Dress" to the Raeburn, "Mrs. Anderson of Inchyra," to realise the difference between journeyman-work and inspiration, between a muddy amalgam of paint, and quality and vivacity.
But the second Mrs. Lee Acton! Ah! there was Romney at his loveliest, easy in mind, seeing the completed design from the inception, unworried by any literary groping after arrangement on the lines of "great art," instantly inspired by the beauty of this second wife of Nathaniel Lee Acton of Livermere Park and Bramford, Sussex, when she rustled into his vision one day in 1791. This Dryad, masquerading in the pretty clothes of a mortal, lurks in a glade; her dainty feet rest near a pool of blue water; her white dress, the simple gown that no doubt Romney persuaded her to wear, golden in the sun, which is setting behind the distant hills and flushing the trees to warmth. Her complexion has the peach-like porcelain quality in which Romney, at his best, rivalled Gainsborough; and as for her fair powdered hair, I think the secret of its touch-and-go, intimate rendering is now lost. There is hardly any colour in the picture, and yet it is all colour. Time, no doubt, has co-ordinated the glow that enwraps and illuminates this sophisticated Dryad, whose folded hands and arch simper seem to announce that her momentary condescension has given the painter immortality.
PLATE VII.—MISS BENEDETTA RAMUS.
(From the picture in the possession of the Hon. W. F. D. Smith)
The younger of the beautiful Ramus girls, who afterwards became Lady Day. Miss Benedetta of the lovely eyes, that languish and sparkle as if pleading against oblivion, rests her hands upon a book in reverie. This beautiful girl and her sister were also painted by Gainsborough. That lovely work was most unfortunately destroyed by fire.