Romney

by Randall Davies

But in placing Romney so high above the crowd of ordinary portrait painters, and a little higher than any except Reynolds and Gainsborough, it is only fair to consider how far short he fell of equalling those two. And it must not be forgotten that the limitations which he imposed upon himself were quite as likely to affect his popularity among his patrons and their friends as with posterity. Classic simplicity is an invaluable quality in the portraiture of everyday men and women, especially when the latter are young and pretty; but a gallery of portraits by Romney would afford a much narrower view of the capabilities of the English School than a similar exhibition of the work of Reynolds or Gainsborough. The oft-repeated assertion of Lord Chancellor Thurlow that “Reynolds and Romney divide the town, and I am of the Romney faction,” must be taken with a considerably larger pinch of salt than is popularly accepted with it. In the first place, Romney was not at all in fashion until after his return from Rome in 1785, by which time Reynolds had been painting portraits for at least twenty years. Gainsborough, too, who was by seven years the senior of Romney, was quite as many years ahead of him in practice, though he had only recently come to London from Bath. In the year 1785 we know that Romney earned £3635 from portraits. At this time, so his pupil Robinson records, his prices were £20 for a head, £30 for a kit-cat, £40 for a half-length, and £80 for a whole length. Taking the average at as low a figure as £35, this means about a hundred commissions in his busiest year. This is certainly a large number, and Sir Joshua never had more than a hundred-and-fifty in a year; but it must not be taken as an average for any great length of years.

Again, when we look at the names of his most distinguished patrons, the list is not as long or as imposing as those of Reynolds and Gainsborough. The latter had the patronage of Royalty, besides a good number of the aristocracy, while Reynolds had, if I may be allowed the expression, “mopped up” all that was most brilliant in beauty, birth, and genius, leaving very little for anybody else. The Catalogue of the Exhibition of National Portraits held at South Kensington in 1867, enumerates but twenty pictures by Romney, and as many as a hundred and fifty by Reynolds.

That Romney’s sensitive disposition and retiring habit of life may in some degree account for his not being more widely popular in his own time is no doubt true. But apart from any other consideration there is no question that a fine portrait by Reynolds is a more satisfying possession than any but the very finest by Romney, and a characteristic one by Gainsborough more exhilarating. Though there is at least one instance in which he “wiped Reynolds’s eye,” namely, with his magnificent head of John Wesley, which was painted in 1789, when Wesley was eighty-six years old. “At the earnest desire of Mrs T.,” the old man wrote, “I once more sat for my picture. Mr. Romney is a painter

indeed! He struck off an exact likeness at once, and did more in an hour than Sir Joshua did in ten.”

Still, there is a variety of qualities in Reynolds’s and Gainsborough’s pictures that we do not find, or expect to find, in those of Romney—a fact which must be taken into account in comparing the number of their respective portraits exhibited in 1867. The stream of popular taste steadily ebbed during the century following Sir Joshua’s death, and it is only of late years that Romney has been “discovered” and restored to public favour. A great deal of Romney’s present-day popularity I cannot help thinking is attributable as much to the delectable quality of his ladies’ faces as to the classic simplicity of treatment which makes them what they are.

Then, of course, there is Lady Hamilton, to whom, as we find Allan Cunningham asserting, many have imputed the chief charm of Romney’s best pictures. In these days it is certainly true that her name is inseparably associated with Romney’s art in the popular mind, and the latest addition to the bibliography of Romney is concerned with nothing but Lady Hamilton. Unfortunately for Romney’s reputation both inside and outside his painting-room, this lady’s fame has so filled the public ear with matters which are altogether distinct from the art of painting, that it is almost impossible to appreciate her influence upon Romney’s art in anything like its proper proportions. We are as it were between two fires—the glamour which she threw over the painter and the glamour which he threw over her; and our view of the matter, unless we are careful to screen our eyes, is likely to be too highly coloured for the ordinary purposes of criticism.

The broad fact seems to be that for nearly a decade the inspiration of Emma Lyon poured like sunlight into Romney’s studio, and although before it came he had for several years established his reputation and done some of his best work in portraiture, its withdrawal, in 1791, was the end of all that was happy or successful in his career. “His imagination was gone,” says Mr. Humphry Ward; “his health, for many years frail, became less robust than ever, and of his portraits and pictures painted after 1791, many exhibit signs of decaying powers.”

That he was exceedingly fond of her need not, of course, be doubted. How could it be otherwise? But is it any more necessary to dwell upon his purely personal relations with her than on those of Sir Joshua Reynolds with Kitty Fisher or Nelly O’Brien? For Reynolds, those two “professional beauties” were sitters, of whom the painter succeeded in painting several beautiful and accomplished portraits. For Romney, Emma Lyon was to some extent the embodiment of the Muse whom I have ventured to postulate as his guardian angel, when engaged in the perilous commerce of painting pretty and fashionable ladies. That she was also the veritable embodiment of all that was pleasing to the mortal eye in the shape of woman is at least equally certain; but unlike so many of her frail sisters, she was a remarkably accomplished and intelligent woman. “She performed both in the serious and comic to admiration,” writes Romney, in a letter describing an evening at Sir William Hamilton’s, “both in singing and acting. Her Nina surpasses everything I ever saw, and I believe as a piece of acting nothing ever surpassed it. The whole company were in an agony of sorrow. Her acting is simple, grand, terrible, and pathetic.”