There are instances in which his ability reaches a very high plane. Some of his portrait figures are really sublime, and the superb dignity of such portraits as those of Lady Hamilton as Circe and Cassandra will not be easy to exceed.
Other important characteristics of this great artist were his love of children and his ability to paint them in all their brisk childish humour. The delicious piquancy of the bright little faces, so full of charm, delight all who behold them, and there is also an irresistible grace and sweetness about the figures of his children that is very noteworthy.
Mark how cleverly he depicts motion, how easily in the Stafford and Clavering groups of children the young people move, and in what graceful attitudes the artist has represented them. They hardly touch the ground as they gracefully glide around through the figures of the mazy dance, and the happiness of their faces and the grace of their postures are alike most charming.
Romney had a very real sense of grace. His ideas were circumscribed by the fashion for classic attire which ruled the day, and the delight which his sitters had in being represented, not in their usual garb and posture, but as some goddess or mythological creation, and clothed in the robes of Greece or Rome.
CHILDREN DANCING IN A RING: PORTRAITS OF
MEMBERS OF THE STAFFORD FAMILY.
Whatever position or costume, however, he adopted, it was always graceful, refined and decorous; but some of his sweetest pictures were those where the simplest of gowns and the most natural of attitudes were selected, as, for example, The Seamstress.
Lady Hamilton, by her ingenuity in placing herself in the most becoming and graceful of attitudes, and by the marvellous power of expression that she possessed, enabling her to show in her countenance the very thoughts of the creation that she was representing, delighted Romney, and over and over again he posed her in various ways, and painted with increasing delight her lovely face.
She, who lived upon adulation, and desired above all that her beauty should be admired, was never tired of sitting to the artist who above all men had the desire and the power to express her features in their wonderful sweetness, and so the memory of the graceful sitter and clever artist are handed down together.