George Romney

Fine Artist

• Born: December 26, 1734
• Birthplace: Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, England
• Died: November 15, 1802
• Place of death: Kendal, Cumbria, England

English painter

Romney was one of the three leading portrait painters, along with Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, in eighteenth century England. At the height of his career Romney’s popularity was the equal of his main rival, Reynolds.

Area of achievement: Art

Early Life

George Romney was born in a small village in northwest England. He was the third child of Ann Romney and John Romney, a carpenter, joiner, and cabinet maker. Romney was sent to the local village school until he was eleven, after which he stayed at home to learn the family business. He worked in the family business for the following nine years, although few details of this period of his life survive. It is known that his early interest in drawing was encouraged by a friend of the family, Mrs. Gardner, and a likeness of her was one of Romney’s first attempts at portraiture. Also while young he is known to have studied a translation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della pintura (1651; A Treatise on Painting, 1721), which he discovered in his father’s library. Romney’s name is inscribed inside this volume and is dated 1754.

By 1755 it was clear in which direction his talents lay, and he was apprenticed to a traveling portrait painter, Christopher Steele, with whom he remained for two years. Steele’s portraits do not survive, and it is therefore difficult to judge how much Romney may have learned from him, but certainly Romney soon became an expert in the grinding and mixing of colors, which was to serve him well throughout his career. His apprenticeship was the only practical instruction he ever received. During this time he married Mary Abbot, the daughter of his landlady, although he had no means of supporting her.

After prematurely breaking off his apprenticeship, he set up his own practice in nearby Kendal. Although he never lacked employment, he was forced to charge low fees, and in consequence had to struggle to make an adequate income. The financial straits of this period did, however, teach him to work quickly, a habit that he was to continue throughout his life and one that enabled him at the peak of his career to take more sitters than his two great rivals, Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Highly ambitious and caring little for anything other than his art, Romney was determined to travel to London to further his career. By March of 1762, Romney had accumulated enough money to make the trip, leaving his wife and their infant son behind in Kendal. In London, he became an immediate success.

Life’s Work

In 1762, George Romney painted The Death of General Wolfe, which the following year won an award of 25 guineas from the Society of Arts for historical painting. It was the first picture he exhibited. Also in 1763, he was one of the hundred signatories of the Deed of the Free Society of Artists, and he exhibited with them until 1769.

In September, 1764, anxious to improve his knowledge of the old masters, he traveled to Paris with his lifelong friend, the lawyer Thomas Greene. He paid particular attention to the work of Peter Paul Rubens. He met the noted French painter Joseph Vernet and visited Versailles, Marly, and St. Cloud before returning to London after six weeks. In 1765 his painting The Death of King Edmund was awarded the second premium of 50 guineas by the Society of Arts, and for the first time one of his paintings attracted the attention of a newspaper critic. During these years he frequently changed lodgings in London and made occasional trips back to Kendal. In 1770, he first exhibited with the Society of Artists. A prolific year of painting followed, and in 1772 he was made a director, and then a fellow, of the Society of Artists. This was the last year he sent works for public exhibition, and in spite of his success he was never to apply for membership in the Royal Academy.

In March, 1773, now on the threshold of recognition and financial security, Romney fulfilled his ambition to travel to Italy, visiting Genoa and Rome. In Rome he devoted himself to studying the works of Raphael and Michelangelo in the Vatican and to making sketches of famous buildings. He also found time to make the acquaintance of other English painters, although his reserved and sensitive nature ensured that he was never the most sociable of men. Romney returned home via Florence, Bologna, where he was offered, but declined, the presidency of the Academy of Painting; Venice, where he studied Titian; and Parma, where he was entranced by the work of Correggio.

He arrived home in July, 1775, and by Christmas he had moved into a large house at Cavendish Square. His best work dates from this period. Sitters were soon arriving in large numbers, including such notable figures as the duke of Richmond, but they came from all classes. Romney would often have up to five sitters a day, and occasionally six. It took three or four sittings to do a three-quarters portrait, making an equivalent of almost one portrait a day. During this most successful period of the painter’s life, he gained more commissions than Reynolds and Gainsborough, and by 1778 his reputation was established as one of the finest portrait painters of the day.

He had also been cultivating a few literary and artistic friends, such as the sculptor John Flaxman and the poet William Cowper. His chief friend was William Hayley, an undistinguished poet who enjoyed a brief period of popular esteem but whose verses are now forgotten. Each year Romney would stay with Hayley at his Sussex home. Hayley, providing the only contemporary account of Romney’s personal appearance, wrote, “He was rather tall, his features were broad and strong, his hair was dark, his eyes indicated much vigour, and still more acuteness of mind.” Although Hayley was kind and well-meaning, anxious to support his friends, his influence on Romney was not entirely beneficial. He persuaded him not to apply for membership in the Royal Academy, for example, convinced that it would only be a trouble to Romney’s excessively timid and irritable nature.

In 1782 came a major event in Romney’s life: his first meeting with the beautiful young Emma Hart, the future Lady Hamilton. She had been brought to him by his friend Charles Greville to sit for a portrait, and for nearly four years she was a frequent visitor to his studio. He became deeply attached to her and regarded her as a source of inspiration for his art. She was the model for more than forty of his paintings, appearing as a Bacchante, Ariadne, Joan of Arc, Contemplation, Comedy, and many other mythic figures and personifications. He referred to her as “the divine lady.”

During the 1790’s, Romney’s health began to fail rapidly, and he was frequently depressed. The number of his unfinished paintings, which was always high, increased alarmingly, and they accumulated in heaps in every corner of his house. Although Romney always worked prodigiously hard, he was easily discouraged by any setback or obstacle, such as the loss of a model. Furthermore, he preferred the excitement of a new task to that of finishing an old one. He frequently complained about the drudgery of portrait painting, which he regarded as an inferior genre. He wanted to do more imaginative work, but his efforts in that direction were often restricted to the time between sitters. He did not have the strength of will to strike out completely in a new direction.

From 1796 onward, his attention was taken up with the building of a house and studio at Hampstead. He moved in at Christmas, 1798, before the house was finished. His paintings were stored inadequately, so that they were exposed to the elements; many were destroyed during the course of the winter, and others were stolen.

In his final years, Romney’s health and his mental powers broke down completely. In 1798 he returned to the north for the first time in thirty years, and the following year he retired to Kendal, to be nursed by the patient and forgiving wife whom he had deserted nearly forty years before. He died on November 15, 1802.

Significance

Since his death, George Romney’s reputation has fluctuated between extremes. For fifty years his name sank into obscurity, but then the pendulum began to swing back, until by the first half of the twentieth century his paintings were fetching exaggerated prices in salerooms. There is now general agreement that he was the third most important portrait painter in late eighteenth century England, surpassed only by Gainsborough and Reynolds.

Despite that distinction (or perhaps in accordance with it), Romney remains an unusual figure in art history. He owed little to the direct teaching of others, and he was always hampered by his lack of early training. His own influence on later art was minimal, although three of his pupils at the end of his career, Isaac Pocock, James Lonsdale, and Thomas Stewardson, became distinguished painters.

As a portrait painter, Romney lacked the range and psychological depth of Reynolds and Gainsborough, and he painted much that was of inferior quality. His best portraits, however, especially those of women and children, convey considerable charm. Excellent examples of these are Mrs. Cawardine and Son, and the Duchess of Gordon and Her Son. His series of portraits of the Stafford family, painted between 1776 and 1782, as well as his Sir Christopher Sykes and Lady Sykes, display his work at its finest, particularly in the simplicity, dignity, and clarity of design for which he always strove.

He failed, however, in his ambition to become a major imaginative and historical painter. Although he was easily stimulated to imagine grand designs, many of them for subjects from works by William Shakespeare or John Milton, he lacked the staying power necessary to complete the task. He left only a few such portraits, the chief of which is an illustration of the shipwreck scene from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which occupied him for several years during middle age. What remains of his work in this area, however, suggests some of the imaginative power of Henry Fuseli or William Blake.

Fuseli’s own comment on Romney, written eight years after Romney’s death, remains a fair assessment of his achievement. Fuseli wrote, “If he had not genius to lead, he had too much originality to follow.… Romney, as artist and as man, is entitled to commendation and esteem.”

Bibliography

Cross, David. A Striking Likeness: The Life of George Romney. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. Biography and critical analysis of Romney’s work. The book describes Romney’s career, relations with peers and family, and desire to become a history painter. Includes a Romney family tree, a bibliography, and an index.

Hagstrum, Jean H. “Romney and Blake: Gifts of Grace and Terror.” In Blake in His Time, edited by Robert N. Essick and Donald Pearce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. William Blake and Romney knew and admired each other’s work, and this article traces with subtlety and insight some of the points of contact between them.

Kidson, Alex. George Romney, 1734-1802. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. In 2002, several museums in the United States and England exhibited Romney’s works to commemorate the bicentennial of his death. This catalog accompanied the exhibition and features reproductions of more than two hundred of Romney’s paintings and drawings. Kidson provides an essay featuring biographical material and a critical analysis of Romney’s work.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Those Delightful Regions of Imagination: Essays on George Romney. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. A collection of essays about Romney’s life and work. The essays examine the artist’s personality, his artistic practice and technique, the relation of his work to the theater, central themes in his work, and his rivalry with Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Mayoux, Jean Jacques. English Painting: From Hogarth to the Pre-Raphaelites. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975. A former professor of English literature at the Sorbonne in Paris gives an illuminating, challenging, and idiosyncratic view of English painting, with a section on Romney.

Pointon, Marcia. “Portrait-Painting as a Business Enterprise in London in the 1780’s.” Art History 7 (1984): 187-205. A well-researched article that examines the social and economic conditions under which painters such as Romney, Reynolds, and James Northcote had to work.

Ward, Humphrey, and W. Roberts. Romney: A Biographical and Critical Essay, with a Catalogue Raisonné of His Works. 2 vols. London: Thomas Agnew and Sons, 1904. This valuable monograph contains much information unavailable elsewhere, including detailed discussion of many of Romney’s paintings. It remains the only catalogue raisonné of his work.

Watson, Jennifer C. George Romney in Canada. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1985. A highly informative and well-annotated catalog of an exhibition of Romney’s works owned in Canada, held at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, and other locations in Canada, in 1985 and 1986.

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