The "Mr. Morland of Capplethwaite," in hunting costume with a dog, is another hard and uninteresting early Romney. His son, in theMemoirs, grows excited over the dog. "No representation," he wrote, "can approach nearer to the truth of nature than the portrait of this dog; the sleekness of the skin, and the characteristic sagacity of the animal are so well depicted as to give it the appearance of reality."
Neither is the remaining Romney in the National Gallery, "Portrait of Lady Craven," a first-rate example, although it has its own sedate and simple charm. This oval once hung in the breakfast-room at Strawberry Hill, and inspired Horace Walpole to compose the following lines:—
"Full many an artist has on canvas fix'dAll charms that Nature's pencil ever mix'd—The witchery of Eyes, the Grace that tipsThe inexpressible douceur of Lips.Romney alone, in this fair image caughtEach Charm's expression and each Feature's thought;And shows how in their sweet assemblage sit,Taste, spirit, softness, sentiment and wit."
Romney does not shine in the Wallace Collection. His sole example, "Mrs. Robinson," is but a "twinkling star" (his own phrase to express the charms of the greatest beauties of the eighteenth century compared with Lady Hamilton) in the galaxy of masterpieces in the large gallery at Hertford House. Hanging on the same wall is Reynolds's version of seaward-gazing "Mrs. Robinson," and the superb full length by Gainsborough that dominates the Gallery, quite eclipsing our Romney's modest presentment of the famous lady, dressed for walking, with her hands in a muff. Her high powdered hair is crowned by a cap, the strings of which are tied beneath her plump chin. There is more character and resolution in the face than in the generality of Romney's portraits. Indeed, she is almost matronly, but the complexion has all his rose-leaf freshness; the touch of colour he permits in the sleeve is characteristic.
This room at Hertford House, with its three portraits of Mrs. Robinson, by Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney, is the place to brood over and speculate upon the dazzling career of this charming woman. A recital of the facts is enough; imagination can supply the rest. First aprotégéof Hannah More; then the attraction of the town as "Perdita" at Drury Lane, she dazzled the Prince of Wales and became his mistress. In receipt of a pension of £500 a year at the age of twenty-five, she amused herself writing novels, poems, and plays, was a member of the Delia Cruscan School, and died, "poor and palsied," in 1800 at the age of forty-two.
Among the nine Romneys at the National Portrait Gallery is a winsome and smiling Emma. Her elbows are upon a table, and her firm chin rests upon her hands; but face and hands suffer from an excess of the Romney red. Here also is the crayon sketch of Cowper which inspired the poet's sonnet to Romney, and of which Cowper wrote, "Romney has drawn me in crayons, and, in the opinion of all here, with his best hand and with the most exact resemblance possible"; his friend Richard Cumberland gazing upwards for inspiration; a "Flaxman modelling the Bust of Hayley," an example of "heroic portraiture"; and the Adam Walker family group—the last picture Romney painted, and interesting for its connection with William Blake. In a letter to Hayley, after Romney's death, Blake, who was collecting material for theLifeby Hayley, wrote in 1804: "He (Adam Walker) showed me also the last performance of Romney. It is of Mr. Walker and his family, the draperies put in by somebody else. It is an excellent picture, but unfinished."
Unfinished also is the large autograph portrait of himself "as he appeared in the most active season of his existence," painted at Eartham in 1780. "He looks a man of genius" is the comment of visitors to the National Portrait Gallery. Certainly he looks an impressionable, sensitive, and easily moved man, with his large, somewhat mournful eyes and the high brow. Place beside Romney's portrait a photograph of Huxley, and you have two types, poles apart, remote as a Perugino from a Frans Hals.
A noble portrait is that of Warren Hastings at the India Office, everything subservient to the finely-cut head with its fringe of silvery hair, and the dark grey eyes looking shrewdly out at the world. Romney took his colour from his environment. With a lovely woman before him he painted loveliness; confronted by Warren Hastings he painted intellect and power; confronted by a Wesley, intellect and spirituality. But he failed when he tried to imagine something "noble and heroic," such as the melodramatic "Milton Dictating 'Paradise Lost' to his Daughters," or a story picture such as the replica of "Serena reading 'Evelina' by Candlelight," at the South Kensington Museum. What inspiration could he derive from Hayley's "Triumph of Temper." The personality of Warren Hastings or Charles Wesley could stimulate his genius—not such verses as the following:—
"Sweet Evelina's fascinating powerHad first beguil'd of sleep her midnight hour;Possesst by Sympathy's enchanting swayShe read, unconscious of the dawning day."
The names of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Raeburn, Romney, and Hoppner are universally known, and many of their pictures, not always the best examples, are familiar; yet how few Britons have any idea of the chronological life-work of these masters. Their pictures in our public galleries are chance acquisitions, sometimes representative, often mere byways of their achievement.
Romney was an unequal painter. A classification of his achievement in order of merit would begin with the score or so of masterpieces, and dwindle downwards through his good, fair, poor, and bad pictures. There is no other word but bad for such productions as "The Shipwreck" and "The Infant Shakespeare surrounded by the Passions"; and if bad be an unfair description of "Newton Displaying the Prism," it is certainly a poor picture, although better than "Milton Dictating 'Paradise Lost.'" I have only seen a photograph of "Newton Displaying the Prism," but Redgrave, who examined the picture in the early sixties, describes it as poor in drawing, dirty and hot in colouring, and weak and common-place in treatment.
Romney stands or falls by his portraits and portrait groups, by the score or so of masterpieces that he painted better than he knew. These are the true "great art," the presentment through the eyes of temperament and training of the thing seen, that he was always striving to escape from in his pursuit of a false "great art," which he struggled to approach through the portals of literature guided by other eyes and other brains.
The inequality of Romney was shown at the 1907 Old Masters' Exhibition at Burlington House. In the six contributions from his brush, or ascribed to him, there was one superb example, the second Mrs. Lee Acton; one good example, the first Mrs. Lee Acton, and one bad example, the hard and discordant sketch of Edward Wortley Montagu. The muddy portrait of a "Lady in a White Dress," and the dull and common painting of the Rev. Thomas Carwardine, although not as bad as the Edward Montagu, were indeed poor Romneys. One only had to turn from the "Lady in a White Dress" to the Raeburn, "Mrs. Anderson of Inchyra," to realise the difference between journeyman-work and inspiration, between a muddy amalgam of paint, and quality and vivacity.
But the second Mrs. Lee Acton! Ah! there was Romney at his loveliest, easy in mind, seeing the completed design from the inception, unworried by any literary groping after arrangement on the lines of "great art," instantly inspired by the beauty of this second wife of Nathaniel Lee Acton of Livermere Park and Bramford, Sussex, when she rustled into his vision one day in 1791. This Dryad, masquerading in the pretty clothes of a mortal, lurks in a glade; her dainty feet rest near a pool of blue water; her white dress, the simple gown that no doubt Romney persuaded her to wear, golden in the sun, which is setting behind the distant hills and flushing the trees to warmth. Her complexion has the peach-like porcelain quality in which Romney, at his best, rivalled Gainsborough; and as for her fair powdered hair, I think the secret of its touch-and-go, intimate rendering is now lost. There is hardly any colour in the picture, and yet it is all colour. Time, no doubt, has co-ordinated the glow that enwraps and illuminates this sophisticated Dryad, whose folded hands and arch simper seem to announce that her momentary condescension has given the painter immortality.
PLATE VII.—MISS BENEDETTA RAMUS.
(From the picture in the possession of the Hon. W. F. D. Smith)
The younger of the beautiful Ramus girls, who afterwards became Lady Day. Miss Benedetta of the lovely eyes, that languish and sparkle as if pleading against oblivion, rests her hands upon a book in reverie. This beautiful girl and her sister were also painted by Gainsborough. That lovely work was most unfortunately destroyed by fire.
PLATE VII.—MISS BENEDETTA RAMUS.PLATE VII.—MISS BENEDETTA RAMUS.
PLATE VII.—MISS BENEDETTA RAMUS.PLATE VII.—MISS BENEDETTA RAMUS.
Recalling the pleasure that a beautiful Romney such as this gives, and eager to pass on my delight to my friends, I imagine a room hung with reproductions of fine Romneys, where the twentieth century could burn a little incense to the eighteenth-century master. But there must be two rooms, for Lady Hamilton must have a compartment to herself, as in this little book.
The Romneys in the first room would include a reproduction of this "Mrs. Lee Acton" from the collection of Lord de Saumarez; "Mrs. Mark Currie," "The Parson's Daughter," and the "Lady with a Child" from the National Gallery, with "Mrs. Robinson" from the Wallace Collection. Beside them I would place those adorable girls, Miss Ramus and Miss Benedetta Ramus, who were also painted together by Gainsborough in the picture known as "The Sisters." That lovely work was, alas! burnt in the fire at Waddesdon. I remember a poem by Mr. Andrew Lang in Longmans' Magazine on one of these sisters. A verse ran—
"Mysterious Benedetta! WhoThat Reynolds or that Romney drewWas ever half so fair as youOr is so well forgot?Those eyes of melancholy brown,Those woven locks, a shadowy crown,Must surely have bewitched the town;Yet you're remembered not."
Forgotten? Remembered not? Living and very near seemed the sisters when I made an expedition to Henley-on-Thames, and was allowed to see Romney's portraits of Miss Ramus and Miss Benedetta in the hall of Greenlands, Mr. W. F. D. Smith's country house. These half-figure portraits have not the frolic daintiness of the "Mrs. Lee Acton," or the "Mrs. Mark Currie." They antedated those sparkling full-lengths by nearly fifteen years. Compared with them Miss Ramus and Miss Benedetta are almost prim. If Romney had wished to make them the centre of a sumptuous decorative scheme, the artist in him knew that such was not the way to treat those dark and dainty gentlewomen. Nowhere, I think, are there better examples of his simplicity of design and handling, his frank statement, without a fleck of personal cleverness or pride, than these sisters who smile on either side of the doorway that issues from the hall at Greenlands. Miss Benedetta of the lovely eyes, that languish and sparkle as if pleading against oblivion, lost in reverie, rests her hands upon a book. The binding of the volume is light brown, the table dark brown; there is a rosy flush in her cheeks and down the tips of her slim fingers; in the grey band, looped with pearls, that binds her hair there is a glint of green; otherwise, the portrait has little colour save in the break of blue sky that surges across the background. I suppose every one compares and makes a choice between the two sisters. The appeal of Benedetta is swiftest, yet when I look at Miss Ramus I know that I should not like to be obliged to choose. The bow of her red lips may be a thought too precise, but how vibrant she is in spite of her composure! how keen and quick the look of that high-bred face! No; I should not like to have to choose between the merry languishing Benedetta and the merry alert Miss Ramus, in her pink dress, with the flaming green gauze veil, and the gleams of gold in hair and gown.
Another beautiful girl, "Miss Vernon as Hebe," now in Warwick House, would have an honoured place in my roomful of fine Romney productions. Well may this charming goddess claim to restore beauty and youth to those who have lost them. Abundant brown hair crowns the pure, untroubled brow; she glides forward, bearing the wine cup, and looking upwards as she advances. As in the Miss Ramus, candour and nobility have here taken the place of the Romney prettiness.
Perhaps it is the curling powdered hair, perhaps the pout of disdain on the lips or the flicker of contempt in the eyes, that gives to "Lady Altamount" (Lady Sligo) the air and very essence of an eighteenth-century aristocrat. This proud and fragile beauty found in Romney, son of a cabinet-maker, the man who could perfectly interpret her exquisiteness.
Does the large white hat, tied with blue ribbons beneath her chin, that "Miss Cumberland" wears, suit the lady? I think so, and so thought Romney, when this dark-eyed daughter of his friend Richard Cumberland decked herself one day in an old-fashioned hat to amuse her family. Romney happened to call, saw the charm of the decoration, and saw his picture.
When I come upon a portrait of a fragile blonde by Romney, I feel that he is at his best with fair women; when I see one of his bold beauties, such as "Lady Morshead," the tangle of her profuse brown hair contrasted with the simple folds of her muslin fichu, I feel that he is at his best with dark women. This "Lady Morshead," doing nothing, but looking charming; bright-eyed "Mrs. Raikes," playing on a spinet; the dark Cholmeley girls; bewitching Sarah with the ringlets; and the more dignified Catherine—they were painted on Romney's best days.
A few of his "Mother and Child" groups must also have place on the walls of my imaginary room—the "Mrs. Russell," in a green dress at Swallowfield Park, holding the sash of her small child, who is standing upon a table, back to the spectator, regarding its chubby face in a circular mirror—a happy design this, most natural and winning; the "Mrs. Canning," seated beneath a tree and clasping her infant to her bosom, but quite conscious that her portrait is being painted; and the "Mrs. Carwardine," in a high white cap, who is consoling her baby and ignoring the painter—a charming and restful group.
Also the boy "Lord Henry Petty," at Landsdowne House, a quaint figure in his blue tail-coat and amber-coloured trousers, standing in an affected attitude, with his fingers marking the passage in a book, which he pretends to have been reading. The boy is posing. Romney did not always succeed in suggesting the simplicity of childhood. Even in the famous group of the "Children of the Earl of Gower," now in the possession of the Duke of Sutherland, delightful as it is, one is conscious that the actions of the children are not spontaneous. Clasping each other's hands, the lively creatures dance round in a ring, their sandalled feet tripping to a measure played by Lady Anne upon a tambourine held in the "grand manner" above her left shoulder. This group has been called Romney's masterpiece. The murmur of pleasure that rises to the lips at the first sight of the "Clavering Children" is checked by the feeling that the small boy must eternally and wearily hold his right arm outstretched on a level with his head. So Romney has fixed him, holding high aloft the leash that confines the two spaniels. Otherwise, the group is delightful. The little girl fondles a puppy, her brother's left arm clasps her waist, and the children, conscious that they are being watched, trip forward through the landscape. In another of the large groups, "The Countess of Warwick and her Children," there is something very taking in the small old-fashioned figure of the boy with the hoop, and in the intimate movement of the girl, who is whispering to her listening mother.
The group of "The Horsley Children," so simply painted and so sure, was designed on one of Romney's happy days. George and Charlotte stand on the steps of a garden terrace beneath a tree, in white dresses with blue sashes. In her right hand the girl holds poppies; in her left a corn-flower.
PLATE VIII.—MISS RAMUS. (From the picture in thepossession of the Hon. W. F. D. Smith.)
Connoisseurs in beauty have long disputed as to which is the lovelier of the two Ramus girls painted by Romney. The bow of Miss Ramus' lips may be a thought too precise, but how vibrant she is in spite of her composure I how keen and quick the look of her high-bred face! It would be hard to make a choice between Miss Ramus and Miss Benedetto.
PLATE VIII.—MISS RAMUS.PLATE VIII.—MISS RAMUS.
PLATE VIII.—MISS RAMUS.PLATE VIII.—MISS RAMUS.
Two portraits of men I should include in my collection of significant Romneys—the "Warren Hastings," with its watchful dignity, and the inward smile that flickers on the calm, purposeful face of John Wesley. From the following extract, printed inWesley's Journal, January 5, 1789, I judge that he, like Thurlow, belonged to the Romney faction: "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."
No one ever accused Romney of a lack of quickness. He could always begin; he could not always continue to the end.
The life of Romney, apart from his paintings, has interested the world in two particulars—his desertion of his wife and his passion for Emma Lyon. This extraordinary woman, the daughter of a blacksmith, began as a nursemaid: she suffered from libertines, loved Charles Greville and lived under his protection, married Sir William Hamilton, became world-famous as the beloved of Nelson, and died in Calais, an exile, where she was buried "at the expense of a charitable English lady."
Romney did not meet her until the year 1782, when he was forty-eight, although it has been suggested that the acquaintance began earlier. Certain it is that Greville brought the lovely girl to the studio in Cavendish Square in 1782, and that, until her departure for Naples in 1789, she was the joy, the light and the inspiration of Romney's life. Mr. Humphry Ward quotes in his Essay a letter Romney wrote to her at Naples, "astonishing in its orthography." A passage runs: "I have planned many other subjects for pictures, and flatter myself your goodness will indulge me with a few sittings when you return to England—I have now a good number of Ladys of (? fashion) setting to me since you left England—but all fall far short of the Sempstress. Indeed, it is the sun of my Hemispheer, and they are the twinkling stars. When I return to London I intend to finish the Cassandra and the picture of Sensibility." It was during her absence that the dejection darkening his latter years began.
She returned in 1791, and joy revived when she tripped into his studio "attired in Turkish costume." Sunshine again flooded his clouding brain, and the man of fifty-seven writes thus to Hayley: "At present, and the greatest part of the summer, I shall be engaged in painting pictures from the divine lady. I cannot give her any other epithet, for I think her superior to all womankind." Shortly afterwards the painter was plunged into gloom by an apparent coolness on the part of the lady, but it passed. She again sits to him, and we read of Romney, the recluse, giving a party in Cavendish Square in her honour: "She is the talk of the whole town and really surpasses everything, both in singing and acting, that ever appeared." Then followed her marriage to Sir William Hamilton at Marylebone Church and return to Italy. Romney and Emma never met again. From Caserta she wrote him a long letter, which shows the innate goodness and sweetness of this beautiful butterfly, who was always pursued, and who was sometimes (not always unwillingly) caught. Here is a passage from that letter of simple self-revelation: "You have known me in poverty and prosperity, and I had no occasion to have lived for years in poverty and distress if I had not felt something of virtue in my mind. Oh, my dear Friend! for a time I own through distress virtue was vanquished. But my sense of virtue was not overcome."
Emma was not only a versatile actress; she was also an artist's model of genius, able to give charm and personality to any character she was asked to assume, and she was shrewd enough to see that there was no surer and more enjoyable avenue to a popular appreciation of her beauty than Romney's brush. Other men, including Sir Joshua, painted the auburn hair, the perfect mouth, the flower-like complexion, the bewitching eyes, and the infinite phases of expression; but Romney limned her with the insight of a lover. For him there was no disillusion. He alone made her eternally beautiful. Did she love him? I think not. She liked him unfeignedly and was flattered by his admiration, but all her love, before the Nelson epoch, was given to Charles Greville. Her marriage to Sir William Hamilton was a bargain for social advancement. He, at the instigation of nephew Charles, appraised her beauty, and succumbed. Her early admirer, Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh, of Up Park, succumbed and rode away. Sir William Hamilton placed the nuptial ring upon the slender finger of his charmer. Emma sat to Romney once only after she had become Lady Hamilton, and after that sitting, on September 6, 1791, there is not a single entry in his Diary until the 12th of the following month. We may infer that the marriage and departure of the "sun of his Hemispheer" put him temporarily out of humour with painting. The most bewitching of his sitters could not fill her place. As well offer Charmian or Iras to Antony when Cleopatra was away.
In theCatalogue Raisonné, already mentioned, which contains all the extant information about Romney's pictures, the authors state that very many so-called "Lady Hamiltons" are neither by Romney nor of Lady Hamilton. Over eighty authentic examples remain detailed in their list. Romney painted many renderings of some of the fanciful characters for which Emma sat—as a Bacchante, for example, of which twelve versions are catalogued. The half-length in the National Portrait Gallery with the eloquent eyes, her rich hair confined in a long linen swathe tied turban-wise, I have already mentioned; also the mocking study in the National Gallery. The parent of all the Bacchantes was the half-length painted about 1784 and sent to Sir William Hamilton at Naples, with Greville's comment: "The dog was ugly, and I made him paint it again." The best known is the full length in the possession of Mr. Tankerville Chamberlayne. Laughing, with head on one side, she glides beneath a tree, leading a goat that is fading into nothingness; but the dog, leaping and barking at the prospect of a scamper with his pretty mistress, is as lively as the lovely priestess of Bacchus.
Romney's earliest picture of Emma was the "Lady Hamilton as Nature," an attraction, in coloured reproductions of varying merit, of London print-shops. She is seated before a formal but charming landscape background holding a dog, almost too large for a pet, in her arms. The red dress is cut low, her bright hair is bound with a double green fillet. She is the personification of youth and gaiety, but let the eighteenth-century poet, who sang her praises as "Nature," speak—
"Flush'd by the spirit of the genial year,Her lips blush deeper sweets—the breath of Youth;The shining moisture swells into her eyesIn brighter glow; her wishing bosom heavesWith palpitations wild."
So a picture may preserve minor verse.
It is amazing to recall that the full-length "Circe" realised but fourteen and a half guineas at the Romney sale in 1807. Twenty years later, in 1831, Croker's contemptuous query, "What is a Ramsey or a Romney worth now?" shows that the star of Romney was still obscured; but in 1890, at the sale of Long's effects, with the figures of the animals painted in by that artistic surgeon, this same Circe realised 3850 guineas.
Bare-footed, with left hand upraised, she advances from the gloom of the rocks, lit on the left by a gleam of sky and sea. Her dress is pale red, the fillet in her hair and the veil that flows behind are pale blue; but it is the face at which we gaze, the pure, childlike, lovely face whose subtleties of simplicity were revealed to the eyes of her constant lover, so sure that in her he had found the realisation of the artist's dream.
It is difficult to say which of the Romney Lady Hamiltons is the most beautiful. Hard it is to choose between those I have mentioned and the lovely mystery of Sir Arthur Ellis's sketch for the "Cassandra"; or the dark hair hooded in white of "The Spinster"; or the startled eyes "Reading the Gazette"; or the half-length, belonging to Lord Rothschild, seated in pensive mood, with her left hand under her chin, the brow shadowed by the black hat, and the eyes pensive as a nun's.
A print-shop near Bond Street utilises a reproduction of this portrait as a hanging sign, as a tailor in Holborn uses the Moroni "Portrait of a Tailor." Men whose route from office to train lies through the neighbourhood have been known to go out of their way for the sake of a glance at Emma. She cheered Romney. She cheers still.
I might well end on this note. The rest, if not silence, is best forgotten. It has been referred to in the first chapter. Romney lived for eleven years after Emma's marriage and painted some good pictures, but he suffered increasingly from failing health and depression. In 1798 after the disastrous building experiment at Hampstead he sold the lease of 32 Cavendish Square to Martin Archer Shee and returned to his wife and child. He bought an estate at Whitestock, near Ulverstone, but did not live to build the house. His brain was clouded during the last two years of his life, and his wife, nursing him, watched the "Worn-out Reason dying in her house." To faithful Mary he murmurs, in Tennyson's poem, these valedictory words—
"Beat, little heart, on this fool brain of mine.I once had friends—and many—none like you.I love you more than when we married. Hope!O yes, I hope, or fancy that, perhaps,Human forgiveness touches heaven, and thence—For you forgive me, you are sure of that—Reflected, sends a light on the forgiver."
The plates are printed by BEMROSE DALZIEL, LTD., Watford
The text at the BALLANTYNE PRESS, Edinburgh
IN THE SAME SERIES
ARTIST. AUTHOR.VELAZQUEZ. S. L. Bensusan.REYNOLDS. S. L. Bensusan.TURNER. C. Lewis Hind.ROMNEY. C. Lewis Hind.GREUZE. Alys Eyre Macklin.BOTTICELLI. Henry B. Binns.ROSSETTI. Lucien Pissarro.BELLINI. George Hay.FRA ANGELICO. James Mason.REMBRANDT. Josef Israels.LEIGHTON. A. Lys Baldry.RAPHAEL. Paul G. Konody.HOLMAN HUNT. Mary E. Coleridge.TITIAN. S. L. Bensusan.CARLO DOLCI. George Hay.LUINI. James Mason.TINTORETTO. S. L. Bensusan.Others in Preparation.