CHAPTER II
ROMNEY, REYNOLDS, AND OTHERS
The rivalry between Reynolds and Romney, that echoes faintly from eighteenth-century memoirs, is focussed by Thurlow's remark made in 1781: "The town is divided between Reynolds and Romney; I belong to the Romney faction." Romney returned the compliment by proclaiming that his full-length of Thurlow was his best production in portraiture—a judgment with which everybody disagrees.
Romney was an ill judge of his own work. Like most creative artists, he honoured the things that he did with difficulty, and cheapened those that were the true expression of his temperament. "This cursed portrait painting," he wrote to Hayley, at the age of fifty-two, "how I am shackled with it. I am determined to live frugally, that I may enable myself to cut it short as soon as I am tolerably independent, and then give myself up to those delightful regions of the imagination." In another letter he refers to portrait painting as "the trifling part of my profession." But that was when he was "shattered and feeble," and tired of the interminable sitters.
It is by his portraits that Romney lives, not by the heroic designs that were so near to his heart. We esteem him for his lovely faces set in a simple decorative design; his ambition was to excel as a painter of "sublime" and historical subjects—scenes from Shakespeare and Milton, and poetical themes for which his egregious friend Hayley ransacked the Eartham Library. Romney was sensitive, eternally in love with the fleeting loveliness of women and children, the artist born in him again each time he saw a new face, but constantly diverted by his ambition, and by the bombastic sentimentalists moving in the Hayley mutual admiration circle at Eartham, where, for twenty years, he spent his summer vacation.
It would have been to Romney's advantage had he seen more of Lord Thurlow and less of Hayley. "Before you paint Shakespeare," cried the tonic Thurlow, "for God's sake read him!" On another occasion when the Chancellor was asked to subscribe to the Shakespeare that Romney and others were illustrating, he said: "What! is Romney at work for it? He cannot paint in that style; it is out of his way. By God, he'll make a balderdash business of it!" I suspect that it was not altogether artistic convictions that made the Chancellor ally himself to the Romney faction. There was more of the man in Sir Joshua than in Romney; and when Thurlow suggested to Reynolds that Orpheus and Eurydice would be an excellent subject for a series of pictures, Sir Joshua snubbed him. The pliable Romney, when Thurlow broached the idea to him, was delighted. He listened so sympathetically (we can imagine the appreciation in his large liquid eyes) to the Chancellor's translation of the episode from Virgil, that the great man was delighted with his protégé, asked him to paint the portraits of his daughters, and bought one of the four pictures which Romney had painted in illustration of Hayley's poem, "The Triumphs of Temper."
The composure of the benign Sir Joshua must have been ruffled by Thurlow's championship of his rival; but Romney, who was a modest man, may be said in his quiet way to have belonged to the Reynolds faction. He is recorded to have said that no man in Europe could have painted such a picture as Reynolds's "Hercules strangling the Serpents"; and when a pupil told him that his picture of Mrs. Siddons was considered superior to Reynolds's portrait, he answered, "The people know nothing of the matter, for it is not."
Romney never sent a picture to the Royal Academy, and consequently his name never came up for election. He seems to have thought that to a man of his excitable temperament it would be better to pursue his art cloistrally and to avoid competition. Hayley encouraged him in this. Romney was his private preserve, and the painter submitted to the ring-fence that his cunning friend built about him.
In 1781 the town may have been divided between Reynolds and Romney, but posterity has a clear idea of the rank of the masters of eighteenth-century portraiture. Ahead of all stand Reynolds and Gainsborough, followed at no great distance by the virile Raeburn; Romney takes rank above Hoppner, and below them is Lawrence of the decadence and his followers in the curtain and column school.