Bolton House.
Other writers describe the Assembly Room as having made part of the artist’s gallery. When, for the purpose of this chapter, I personally visited the place to make inquiries on the spot, I was informed that, until recently, the Assembly Room and other public rooms adjoining it had been totally separate from the Holly-bush Tavern, making in point of fact part of another house, with which, except by going through the kitchen and garden of the inn, there was no communication. But all this had been altered, to the great convenience of persons attending the balls, concerts, lectures, etc.; and the lofty spacious rooms, further enlarged and decorated, were by these changes attached to, and entered from, the tavern.
More than forty years have passed since the above paragraphs were written, and all the functions, which then made the Holly-bush and the old Assembly Room of importance, are now removed to the Conservatoire, Haverstock Hill. I learn from Baines’ ‘Records of Hampstead,’ the Assembly Room, etc., is to this day held on a totally different agreement from the inn.
The life of Romney, as told by his biographers, is a melancholy one. In order to devote himself wholly to art and the acquisition of fame and fortune, he had sacrificed all domestic happiness, and condemned a young and loving wife to years of wasting and protracted solitude. When at last weary of the town and society, or, as his biographer puts it, ‘filled with that desire of the unsatisfied soul for a peace that the world cannot give,’ he had abandoned, after twenty years’ residence, his fine house in Cavendish Square, and had thrown away more than £2,000 on the building of a coveted retirement at Hampstead, a structure in which ‘the painting-room and gallery had been nobly planned, but all domestic conveniences overlooked.’ Here, with his friend and panegyrist, the poet Hayley—who, by the way, writes of his abode as his ‘singular house at Hampstead’—we find him projecting new subjects for his easel, and reproducing in characters as varied as her fortune the fascinating Lady Hamilton. Now she appears as Nature,[148] as the enchantress Circe, as a Magdalen with tear-stained eyes, a wood-nymph, the musically-inspired virgin St. Cecilia, or a vine-crowned Bacchante, as she smiles on us from the walls of the National Gallery.[149]
It was during Romney’s residence at Hampstead that Boydell resolved on publishing his ‘Shakespeare Gallery,’ and enlisted, among other artists, Romney’s talent for his enterprise.
‘Before you paint Shakespeare,’ observed Lord Thurlow, to whom the painter mentioned his commission, ‘I advise you to read him.’ A very pertinent suggestion, even if a little obvious.
In his fine painting-room during its first novelty Romney continued to receive visitors of high rank, and amongst other lovely personages the beautiful Mrs. Bosanquet and her children, as they stepped into the studio from their walk or drive, fresh as the Heath itself that they had crossed; the artist’s weary heart turning the while to his waiting wife, who through long years had endured, as Milton expresses it, ‘that greatest injury to the gentle spirit—the suffering of not being beloved, and yet retained.’
But now, when he had reached the desired position where, ‘without reference to gain or patronage, he was free to work out his most ambitious conceptions of art, his strength failed him, his hands shook,’ and after two years’ struggle in his mansion on the hill at Hampstead, where Hayley at this period found him ‘solitary and dejected,’ the mistaken man returned in the summer of 1799 to his faithful wife, whom he had only visited twice in thirty years, to learn, Howitt thinks, from her gentle, unreproaching tenderness how much he had lost by leaving her.
It is a melancholy story, this, of man’s ambitious vanity, losing the zest of life for a vapour of laudation from the mouths of men, but a notice of Holly-bush Hill would be incomplete without it. He lingered, rather than lived, till 1802, and died November 15 of that year, reaching to nearly sixty-eight years of age, helpless as an infant. His Hampstead house and its contents were sold, but being ‘wholly without domestic accommodation, and the gallery and painting-room out of all proportion for family requirements,’ the use which Park assigns to it was no doubt the only practical one to which it could be appropriated.