Universal Magazine. Hayley says that he consumed the time of his fellow-workmen in sketching them in various attitudes, while John Romney states that Lionardo’s treatise on painting, illustrated by many fine engravings, was early in his hands. Cumberland describes him as “a child of nature who had never seen or heard of anything that could elicit his genius or urge him to emulation, and who became a painter without a prototype.” At nineteen, however, he was apprenticed for four years to a painter called Count Steele, who was practising in the neighbouring town of Kendal. During this time he fell in love with a young lady of some little fortune, Mary Abbot, and on October 14, 1756, he carried her across the border to Gretna Green and married her.
His precipitate marriage drew upon him the rebuke of his parents, but he vindicated himself with some firmness and skill. “If you consider everything deliberately,” he wrote, “you will find it to be the best affair that ever happened to me; because if I have fortune I shall make a better painter than I should otherwise have done, as it will be a spur to my application; and my thoughts being now still, and not obstructed by youthful follies, I can practise with more diligence and success than ever.”
According to Hayley, he soon perceived that his marriage was an obstacle to his studies; that he was ruined as an artist, and that he might bid farewell to all hopes of fame and glory, although he was devoting himself with all his might to his work. “The terror of precluding himself from those distant honours,” says Hayley—to whom, by-the-by, we are under no obligation to believe more than we wish—“by appearing in the world as a young married man, agitated the ambitious artist almost to distraction, and made him resolve very soon after his marriage, as he had no means of breaking the fetters which he wildly regarded as inimical to the improvement and exertion of his genius, to hide them as much as possible from his troubled fancy.”
This exordium of Hayley’s is, as it were, in the nature of a “preliminary announcement” of the separation between Romney and his wife, when five years later he resolved to try his fortune in London.
“In working rapidly and patiently at different places in the north, for a few years,” Hayley continues, “by painting heads as large as life at the price of two guineas or figures at whole length on a small scale for six guineas, he contrived to raise a sum amounting almost to a hundred pounds; taking thirty for his own travelling expenses, and leaving the residue to support an unoffending partner and two children, he set forth alone, without even a letter of recommendation, to try the chances of life in the metropolis.”
That was in 1762; and for a much longer period than Shakespeare, and with no occasional visits to his family, Romney worked in London and became more and more famous, until, as we have seen, his decline set in.
“The summer of 1799 came,” writes Allan Cunningham, “but Romney could neither enjoy the face of nature, nor feel pleasure in his studio and gallery. A visible mental languor sat upon his brow—not diminishing but increasing; he had laid aside his pencils; his swarm of titled sitters, whose smile in other days rendered passing time so agreeable, were moved off to a Lawrence, a Shee, or a Beechey; and thus left lonely and disconsolate among whole cartloads of paintings, which he had not the power to complete, his gloom and his weakness gathered and grew upon him.... In these moments his heart and his eye turned towards the north—where his son, a man affectionate and kind, resided; and where his wife, surviving the cold neglect and long estrangement of her husband, lived yet to prove the depth of a woman’s love, and show to the world that she would have been more worthy of appearing at his side, even when earls sat for their pictures, and Lady Hamilton was enabling him to fascinate princes with his Calypsos and Cassandras. Romney departed from Hampstead, and taking the northern coach arrived among his friends at Kendal in the summer of 1799. The exertion of travelling and the presence of her whom he once had warmly loved overpowered him; he grew more languid and more weak, and finding fireside happiness he resolved to remain where he was; he purchased a house and authorised the sale of that on Hampstead Hill.”
So much for the parallel as concerned the private life of either. But what about his art? Where in Shakespeare’s literary career are we to find anything comparable with the influence of Emma Lyon on Romney’s painting during the crowning decade of his accomplishment? I suggest as the answer, that during a similar period, of about the same duration, namely from about 1593 to 1603, we may trace a similar influence on the poet, which is embodied in a series of masterpieces numbering over a hundred, namely, most if not all, of the first hundred and twenty-five of “Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” They were all written to one person, and in such terms of art as have led others besides Alexander Dyce to suppose that they were really addressed to the poet’s muse rather than to any corporeal being. As in the case of Romney, the author has been maligned by the undiscerning vulgar for supposed deviations from the strict path of virtue in his relations with his friend. But for any one who has an understanding of the spirit of art there is nothing in either case to support the allegation. Had Shakespeare and Romney looked no farther than their own hearths for artistic inspiration, the world would have been the poorer: that is all.