The Project Gutenberg eBook ofRomney

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofRomneyThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: RomneyAuthor: C. Lewis HindRelease date: August 1, 2011 [eBook #36932]Most recently updated: January 7, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Al Haines*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMNEY ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: RomneyAuthor: C. Lewis HindRelease date: August 1, 2011 [eBook #36932]Most recently updated: January 7, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Al Haines

Title: Romney

Author: C. Lewis Hind

Release date: August 1, 2011 [eBook #36932]Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMNEY ***

MASTERPIECESIN COLOUR

EDITED BYT. LEMAN HARE

ROMNEY

PLATE I.—THE HORSLEY CHILDREN. From the picturein the possession of Messrs. Thos. Agnew & Sons. (Frontispiece)

Few painters have rivalled Romney in expressing the simplicity and naïveté of children. These portraits of Master George and Miss Charlotte Horsley are excellent examples of his mastery of an artless pose, and of the reticence of his colour. How delightfully the flowers tell against the white dresses.

PLATE I.—THE HORSLEY CHILDREN.PLATE I.—THE HORSLEY CHILDREN.

ROMNEY

BY C. LEWIS HIND

ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHTREPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR

title page art

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACKNEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.1907

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PlateI.The Horsley Children. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FrontispieceFrom the picture in the possession ofMessrs. Thos. Agnew & SonsII.Sketch Portrait of Lady HamiltonFrom the picture in the National GalleryIII.Mrs. Mark CurrieFrom the picture in the National GalleryIV.The Parson's Daughter: a PortraitFrom the picture in the National GalleryV.Lady with a ChildFrom the picture in the National GalleryVI.Mrs. Robinson—"Perdita"From the picture in the Wallace CollectionVII.Miss Benedetta RamusFrom the picture in the possession of theHon. W. F. D. SmithVIII.Miss RamusFrom the picture in the possession of theHon. W. F. D. Smith

RomneyRomney

High over the western boundary of Cavendish Square rose a tripod wooden scaffolding, supporting a gigantic crane cutting the arch of the sky; on windy days the smoke from the engine was blown upwards into space. Below, twentieth-century mansions were growing on the site of old Harcourt House, for Cavendish Square, like the rest of London, was suffering an architectural change into something strange and new.

Some of the eighteenth-century houses remain, and as I sought No. 32, in the early summer of 1907, I wondered if this dwelling of memories had escaped the builder. Abundant memories! Into that house, through the later years of the eighteenth century, passed the flower of English loveliness, breeding, valour, brains, wit and frailty. For this was Romney's house, with the large painting-room at the back, which he, greatly daring, rented in 1775, to the satisfaction of the landlord, whose property had been untenanted since the death of Francis Cotes, R.A., five years before. Soon the great Sir Joshua showed signs of Olympian jealousy at the success of the raw man from the North, reserved, silent, moody, whose acquaintance with thebeau mondedid not go beyond his studio door; who worked by night on designs for "great or heroic art," and who had a genius for fixing the fleeting loveliness of a woman's face so simply and fragrantly that we liken a fine Romney to a rosebud arranged in a pattern of artless leaves.

PLATE II.—SKETCH PORTRAIT OF LADY HAMILTON.

(From the picture in the National Gallery)

Her rich brown hair falls in tempestuous disorder over a pillow; the mouth is open; the eyes are as near to tragedy as the volatile Emma could go. This sketch (circular, 1 ft. 6 in.) was presented to the National Gallery in 1898.

PLATE II.—SKETCH PORTRAIT OF LADY HAMILTON.PLATE II.—SKETCH PORTRAIT OF LADY HAMILTON.

Sir Joshua, at work in Leicester Square, realised that the stream of fashion flowing to his studio had been diverted. He did not refer to Romney by name! He merely called him "the man in Cavendish Square," and be sure that some candid friend repeated to him Thurlow's public declaration: "The town is divided between Reynolds and Romney; I belong to the Romney faction."

If you think that plain-speech Thurlow exaggerated, glance at the verbatim transcript of Romney's Diaries, giving the names and appointments of his sitters, printed in the monumental work by Mr. Humphry Ward and Mr. W. Roberts. In less than twenty years over nine thousand sittings in the house in Cavendish Square are recorded.

If the stones of Cavendish Square had language! To No. 32 came Warren Hastings, Burke, Thurlow, Garrick, John Wesley, lords and ladies innumerable, the two lovely Ramus girls, the beautiful Mrs. Lee Acton, Mrs. Mark Currie, Mrs. "Perdita" Robinson, and the adorable Miss Vernon. Other men seek elation in wine, or spring, in Mozart or Grieg; Romney found it in the flash of a new face, "lit with the shock of eager eyes." Thither came the pretty Gower, Clavering, Warwick, and Horsley children, and one day in 1782 that "divine lady" Emma, when Romney was forty-eight. In she floated, laughter in her eyes, joy on her lips, sunshine in her presence—shadowed by her cavalier, Charles Greville, whose emotions were as precisely under control as running motor to a chauffeur. Thus joy entered into his life, and joy left him, when, nine years later, he painted Emma for the last time after her marriage to Sir William Hamilton. The syren having departed he was soon to be on his way—a broken man, still ambitious but ineffectual—to the arms of deserted Griselda, patiently awaiting her faithless husband in Kendal.

Having reached this point in my meditations, I came abreast of No. 32, and found a brand-new, pleasing house, without tablet or bust. Sir Joshua marched conquering to the goal: Romney fell before the last lap. I paced the square and thought of his life that has given immortality to so many. The eighteenth century is vocal on the canvases of her great painters. The other day I saw the two Ramus girls smiling from a wall in a house by Henley-on-Thames, and they seemed more alive than the goggled, huddled women that had just flashed along the highroad in a motor car. And as I mused by the trees in Cavendish Square, dominated by that vast crane—the sign-mark of new London—cutting the sky, I saw clearly the three periods of Romney's life symbolised by aHorse, aHouse, and the wordsHome Again.

It is March 14, 1762. George Romney, aged twenty-eight, mounts his nag at Kendal and rides forth, with fifty pounds in his saddle-bags, to seek fame and fortune as a painter in London. Nothing matters but his career. Doubtless he is sure—or as sure as an emotional, impressionable man, taking his colour from his surroundings, but conscious of great powers, can be—that when his pockets are full of guineas, he will send for Mary and the children; but that is all vague. He knows, if he does not confess it to himself, that he has outgrown the pretty, patient creature he married seven years before, after she had nursed him through fever in his Kendal lodgings. As he rides he recalls his early days in the farmhouse at Beckside: his versatile father—farmer, cabinet-maker, draughtsman, and a dozen other things; his affection for Williamson, watchmaker and musician; the influence of Christopher Steele—"itinerant dauber"; his stay in York, where he saw Sterne; the first picture he painted—a hand holding a letter for the post-office at Kendal; the portraits he produced at two guineas for a head and six guineas for a whole length; then more success, and finally that lottery of his unsold works at the Kendal Town Hall, eighty-two tickets at half-a-guinea each. The proceeds, added to his savings, made him master of a hundred guineas. Half went to Mary; and here he is, with the other fifty in his saddle-bags, a free man, jogging towards London. Somehow he will find the intricate key to fame. But first he must seek a lodging. He scans bewildering London, puts up at the Castle Inn, and a fortnight later moves to Dove Court, near the Poultry end of Cheapside.

It is March 27, 1776—fourteen years have passed. Romney is in his Cavendish Square house waiting for the first sitter recorded in his Diaries—"Lord Parker at 9 o'clock." Two more are to follow that day, "Miss Vernon at half-past 10," and "Lady Betty Compton at ¼ to 2." Seven more are booked for the three following days, and on Sunday he expects "At two a lady." He is well pleased. Fame is at his elbow. Fourteen busy years have glided by since his nag first clattered on the Cheapside cobbles. He has painted many pictures, always believing that "heroic art" is his forte, and portraits merely a means of living, and he has refused to exhibit at the Royal Academy, holding that public competition is bad for a man with "aspen nerves, shy, private, studious, and contemplative." In those fourteen years thegauchenorth countryman has seen something of the world. He has visited Paris, and he has made a tour lasting two years and three months through Italy, without which the education of an eighteenth-century painter was considered incomplete. Troubles he has had, of course. There was that cruel affair of the Society of Arts' competition, in which his picture of "The Death of Wolfe" won the prize; but the award of fifty guineas was, for some mysterious reason, withdrawn, and he had to be content with a consolation gift. Romney believes that Reynolds had a hand in it; but that is hard to credit. Italy and success and the Cavendish Square venture have blotted out that early disappointment. Taking Francis Cotes' large house was a bold step, and it had been complicated, at the critical moment, by an offer from Lord Warwick to visit Warwick Castle and paint a companion to the "very respectable portraits, chiefly by Vandyke, collected by the Earl." Romney refused that tempting offer (he painted the family group later), determined to let nothing delay the Cavendish Square plunge. How well it has turned out! Like Sir Joshua he has begun a Diary of his sitters. The hands of the clock point to nine. It is time Lord Parker arrived. And at half-past ten, joy! he will be shyly welcoming the beautiful Miss Vernon. The image of Mary, in the far-away north, is very faint.

More than twenty years have passed. The Cavendish Square house is let to Sir Martin Archer Shee: Romney has given up portrait painting, and in the Hampstead studio purposes to devote himself to heroic art and win immortality with his Miltonic subjects. But his health grows worse. The game is up. Oppressed, conscious of numbness in his hand and a swimming in his head, chagrined at the muddled failure of his building experiments at Holly Bush Hill, Hampstead—that "whimsical structure covering half the garden,"—where some of his pictures were destroyed by weather and others stolen, he longs only for peace and escape from himself. Yet how triumphant has been the course of those twenty years in Cavendish Square. Never throwing off the mask of the recluse, he has made friends after his own kind; he has moved in the Eartham set which revolved round the orb of the preposterous Hayley. There he met Cowper, and that "elegant female," Miss Seward, the "Swan of Lichfield," who would address him as "beloved and honoured Titiano," or as Raphael, while he would greet her as Sappho; Flaxman, too, he has known, who bought for him in Italy ten large cases of casts—the Laöcoon, the Apollo Belvedere, and so on. These the painter would exhibit to his select friends and pupils in his studio at night, a powerful lamp shining down upon the Laöcoon. Then was Romney happy. Away from the distraction of the "new face lit with the shock of eager eyes," he could bemuse himself with the contortions of the Laöcoon, and believe that he was surrounded by the creations of "great art."

But the game is now up. Sorely hurt in the battle, seeing nothing clearly, little dreaming how famous his portraits—"that cursed drudgery"—would make him in the twentieth century, he leaves London and makes his way back to Mary. She nurses him, and buries him after two years of "complete imbecility."

*****

PLATE III.—MRS. MARK CURRIE.

(From the picture in the National Gallery)

A typical and charming Romney. Miss Elizabeth Close married Mr. Mark Currie on January 18, 1789, and sat to Romney for the first time on the 7th of May in the same year. The painter received sixty guineas for this portrait.

PLATE III.—MRS. MARK CURRIE.PLATE III.—MRS. MARK CURRIE.

The sun is shining cheerfully in Cavendish Square, and Romney's troubles have been long quieted, forgotten in the pleasure his work gives us. No! I do not feel any sadness in recalling his life. Death pays all debts.

No. 32 looks very spick and span in the bright sunshine, and as I gaze at it I perceive above the tall ground-floor windows two heads of cherubs in stone, just like Sir Joshua's Heads of Angels in the National Gallery. Is it intentional, I wonder? Did the architect of this new house wish subtly to suggest that he, like Lord Thurlow, belonged to the Sir Joshua faction?

Maybe. I don't know, but I shall never pass the house without thinking so. Poor Romney! He hated irony and wit—and irony in stone is more enduring than irony in words or paint.

The rivalry between Reynolds and Romney, that echoes faintly from eighteenth-century memoirs, is focussed by Thurlow's remark made in 1781: "The town is divided between Reynolds and Romney; I belong to the Romney faction." Romney returned the compliment by proclaiming that his full-length of Thurlow was his best production in portraiture—a judgment with which everybody disagrees.

Romney was an ill judge of his own work. Like most creative artists, he honoured the things that he did with difficulty, and cheapened those that were the true expression of his temperament. "This cursed portrait painting," he wrote to Hayley, at the age of fifty-two, "how I am shackled with it. I am determined to live frugally, that I may enable myself to cut it short as soon as I am tolerably independent, and then give myself up to those delightful regions of the imagination." In another letter he refers to portrait painting as "the trifling part of my profession." But that was when he was "shattered and feeble," and tired of the interminable sitters.

It is by his portraits that Romney lives, not by the heroic designs that were so near to his heart. We esteem him for his lovely faces set in a simple decorative design; his ambition was to excel as a painter of "sublime" and historical subjects—scenes from Shakespeare and Milton, and poetical themes for which his egregious friend Hayley ransacked the Eartham Library. Romney was sensitive, eternally in love with the fleeting loveliness of women and children, the artist born in him again each time he saw a new face, but constantly diverted by his ambition, and by the bombastic sentimentalists moving in the Hayley mutual admiration circle at Eartham, where, for twenty years, he spent his summer vacation.

It would have been to Romney's advantage had he seen more of Lord Thurlow and less of Hayley. "Before you paint Shakespeare," cried the tonic Thurlow, "for God's sake read him!" On another occasion when the Chancellor was asked to subscribe to the Shakespeare that Romney and others were illustrating, he said: "What! is Romney at work for it? He cannot paint in that style; it is out of his way. By God, he'll make a balderdash business of it!" I suspect that it was not altogether artistic convictions that made the Chancellor ally himself to the Romney faction. There was more of the man in Sir Joshua than in Romney; and when Thurlow suggested to Reynolds that Orpheus and Eurydice would be an excellent subject for a series of pictures, Sir Joshua snubbed him. The pliable Romney, when Thurlow broached the idea to him, was delighted. He listened so sympathetically (we can imagine the appreciation in his large liquid eyes) to the Chancellor's translation of the episode from Virgil, that the great man was delighted with hisprotégé, asked him to paint the portraits of his daughters, and bought one of the four pictures which Romney had painted in illustration of Hayley's poem, "The Triumphs of Temper."

The composure of the benign Sir Joshua must have been ruffled by Thurlow's championship of his rival; but Romney, who was a modest man, may be said in his quiet way to have belonged to the Reynolds faction. He is recorded to have said that no man in Europe could have painted such a picture as Reynolds's "Hercules strangling the Serpents"; and when a pupil told him that his picture of Mrs. Siddons was considered superior to Reynolds's portrait, he answered, "The people know nothing of the matter, for it is not."

Romney never sent a picture to the Royal Academy, and consequently his name never came up for election. He seems to have thought that to a man of his excitable temperament it would be better to pursue his art cloistrally and to avoid competition. Hayley encouraged him in this. Romney was his private preserve, and the painter submitted to the ring-fence that his cunning friend built about him.

In 1781 the town may have been divided between Reynolds and Romney, but posterity has a clear idea of the rank of the masters of eighteenth-century portraiture. Ahead of all stand Reynolds and Gainsborough, followed at no great distance by the virile Raeburn; Romney takes rank above Hoppner, and below them is Lawrence of the decadence and his followers in the curtain and column school.

Looking at a fine Romney, such as "Mrs. Lee Acton," or "Mrs. Mark Currie," or "Lady Hamilton," with her left hand tucked beneath her chin, or the earlier painted Ramus girls, one feels that exquisiteness and simplicity of design can go no further; but pass from "Mrs. Mark Currie" to Raeburn's "Portrait of a Lady," hanging on the staircase of the National Gallery, from "Mrs. Lee Acton" to, say, Reynolds' "Nelly O'Brien" at Hertford House, or from Romney's "Mrs. Robinson" to Gainsborough's "Mrs. Robinson," and the superiority of Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Raeburn sounds out like a thunder-clap. Romney at his best is one of the glories of English portraiture, but in many of his multifarious portraits he is not at his best. Few painters are able to stand the test of a collected exhibition of their works, and it is no wonder that Romney did not emerge artistically scatheless from the Grafton Gallery ordeal of his collected works in 1900. The first impression was delightful. "Charming!" one murmured, but in the end monotony ruled, and, satisfactory as his clear colour often is, the Romney brick-dust red is not eternally agreeable. Yet through him Lady Hamilton and other delightful creatures have achieved immortality. We may criticise, belittle, and place him; but a fine Romney produces the elation of sudden sunshine, or the first sight in spring-time of a bank of primroses.

He had no recreations except his violin: his life was entirely devoted to his art. At Eartham, during his summer holiday, he worked incessantly. There, in "a riding-house of wood" converted into a studio, which "afforded him a walk of a hundred feet under cover," he "meditated" on the various pictures from Shakespeare that he meant to produce. In London, at the height of his prosperity, he worked till bedtime, occasionally when the days grew longer drinking tea at Kilburn Wells, or dining at the Long Room, Hampstead. Married early, he left his wife, as all the world knows, to seek fame in London at the age of twenty-eight, found it, enjoyed it, lost his health, became hypochondriac, and returned to his wife, at the age of sixty-five, a broken and shattered man. His biographers have censured or excused his marital conduct. Mary seems to have made no complaint. She knew George and understood him, knew that he had ceased to care for her, and that his art held, and would always hold, chief place in his affections. I am not tempted to play the part of moralist. Romney's niche in the Temple of Fame is as painter, not as husband. Tennyson treated the domestic side in his poem "Romney's Remorse." The painter, according to the bard—

"... madeThe wife of wives a widow bride, and lostSalvation for a sketch."

Edward Fitzgerald, a bachelor, observes in one of his letters: "When old, nearly mad, and quite desolate, he went back to her, and she received him and nursed him till he died. This quiet act of hers is worth all Romney's pictures; even as a matter of Art, I am sure."

Romney supported his wife, no great tax on a man who made nearly £4000 in one year, and he paid her two or three visits in the course of his triumphant career. The ugly part of the story is that he posed in London as a bachelor.

PLATE IV.—THE PARSON'S DAUGHTER: A Portrait.

(From the picture in the National Gallery)

This dainty portrait was called "The Parson's Daughter" by a former owner. Romney must have enjoyed the brief task of painting her. She gave him no trouble, you may be sure. Easily as a thrush sings he suggested the powdered hair framing the coquettish face masked in demureness, the long neck springing from the slight frame, and the note of green in the auburn curls.

PLATE IV.—THE PARSON'S DAUGHTER: A Portrait.PLATE IV.—THE PARSON'S DAUGHTER: A Portrait.

Shy, something of a recluse, impressionable, with delicate perceptions that made him a favourite among women, he was a man of good physical strength and robust appearance. According to Cumberland, he talked well. His harangues on art were "uttered in a hurried accent, an elevated tone, and very commonly accompanied by tears, to which he was by constitution prone." We are also informed that a noble sentiment never failed to make his eyes to overflow and his voice to tremble.

The early biographies of Romney were written to counteract one another. Hayley's foolish volume of 1809 was composed to correct the "coarse representation" of Cumberland, which was published in theEuropean Magazine. Cumberland was a sensible man, and he wrote well. The useful but too appreciative volume by his son, John Romney, was a counterblast to Hayley. Later lives have been George Paston's admirable study, and the indispensableCatalogue Raisonnéby Mr. W. Roberts, with a biographical and critical essay by Mr. Humphry Ward, which also includes the text of Romney's Diaries from 1776 to 1795, acquired at Miss Romney's sale in 1894.

Romney lived in an age when men and women of sensibility wrote poems of praise to one another. Cowper's is perhaps the best known.

"But this I mark, that symptoms none of woeIn thy incomparable work appear."

It is poor stuff; but better than the effusions of Hayley, Miss Seward, and John Halliday.

To-day—one hundred and five years after his death—no millionaire's gallery is complete without a Romney, and the desire to possess a fine example grows fiercer yearly.

Doubtless, the purchasers at public auction in 1896 of the "Ladies Caroline and Elizabeth Spencer," in white and red dresses, for £10,500, and, in 1902, of Miss Sarah Rodbard fondling a Skye terrier curled up upon a stone pedestal, for the same price, were well content with their bargains. Romney received £84 apiece for these pictures. His "Lady Hamilton as Nature," which was bought by Mr. Fawkes of Farnley, Turner's friend, for 50 guineas in 1816 was resold after the Grafton Exhibition for, it is said, 20,000 guineas. The picture is now in Paris.

The witchery of his portraits of dainty dolls, the sweet composure of his young matrons, the charm of his children, the delicacy of his presentments of men, such as the "Wesley" and the "Warren Hastings," captivate the unlearned as well as connoisseurs. The appeal of his gift for expressing momentary loveliness is instantaneous. He was a poet in paint to a far greater degree than the so-called poets of the Eartham set were in words. No problem is offered; the freshness of the flower-like faces is stated simply and without hint of cleverness. The reticent colour lingers on sash or ribbon, and beneath the powdered fair hair the rose and cream tints of these pretty mondaines bloom like the petals of carnations against the light. So virginal are the typical Romney ladies, that it is almost a shock to read that some of the portraits were never paid for, because the bright creatures had been passed on from the protector who gave the commission for the portrait. John Romney found a neat phrase when he said that his father "could impart to his female figures that indescribable something—thatje ne sais quoi—which captivates the spectator without his being able to account for it."

PLATE V.—LADY WITH A CHILD.

(From the picture in the National Gallery)

The dark blue eyes of the child gaze out upon the world in reposeful wonder. The pose is delightfully natural. Romney's genius for design never failed him when his subject was a girl, a mother and child, or a group of children at play.

PLATE V.—LADY WITH A CHILD.PLATE V.—LADY WITH A CHILD.

Strange it is that until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Romney revival began, fostered by the "Old Masters' Exhibitions" and auction sales, his fame had suffered an almost total eclipse. His portraits were hidden in private collections, the National Gallery set had not been acquired, and nobody cared about his heroic and historical cartoons and studies, at Cambridge and elsewhere.

The eclipse of the fame of Romney is no doubt partly due to the fact that he never exhibited at the Royal Academy, which in those days meant that "outsiders," so far as the public was concerned, were truly in outer darkness. When Romney retired from contact with the fashionable world, with which he never associated himself except as a painter; when he forsook his disastrous building experiments at Hampstead, for the living death (of his later years) at Kendal, he passed out of public life. His portraits ceased to be a topic. There were no weekly art columns in newspapers to fan the embers of his fame; the National Gallery was not founded, and the age of illustrated essays on private collections had not dawned.

The pages of the Diaries record, as I have already said, about nine thousand sittings in less than twenty years—a colossal labour; but some of the portraits were never finished, others have been lost or stolen. He kept no Diary until he had settled in Cavendish Square in 1775, after his journey to Italy. Before that period Romney had painted hundreds of pictures of which but scanty records remain. A few examples may still be found in the houses of the descendants of the original owners around Kendal.

Forty-five portraits of Lady Hamilton are recorded in Messrs. Ward and Roberts'Catalogue Raisonné, sixteen illustrations of Shakespeare, two of Milton, and over fifty miscellaneous and Fancy subjects. In the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge are a number of Pictorial Designs and studies presented by the Rev. George Romney in 1817, and at the Liverpool Royal Institution are eighteen cartoons, presented in 1823.

It would be unjust to call these historical and heroic subjects a monument of misdirected effort; but if Romney's claim to fame rested upon them, he would be of less account even than West and Fuseli.

His ardour was indefatigable, but it often spent itself when the novelty of beginning a sketch or portrait had worn off. In reading, too, his quick imagination soon flagged. At the end of one act, even of one scene, of Shakespeare's, he was ready to begin his picture. "The more he painted," says Hayley, "the greater was his flow of spirits." A friend surprised him one night working at an "Accusation of Susannah by the two Elders" by lamplight. It was never finished. Late in life he conceived a Gargantuan scheme of founding a Milton Gallery which should rival Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery.

The most attractive of his fanciful subjects is "Shakespeare nursed by Tragedy and Comedy," perhaps because Lady Hamilton was the model for Comedy (not in person; she was in Naples at the time), and Romney's brush was always inspired when he painted her adorable face. Shakespeare—a robust, nude babe—sits on a cradle in the landscape holding a flageolet, to the accompaniment of endearments from the pretty Tragedy and Comedy ladies. The least attractive, indeed the silliest, is the "Shipwreck," an early work engraved in Hayley'sLife. A huddle of exaggeration and emphasis, it has all the vices of the melodramatic heroic pictures of the period.

Romney had some talent as a musician, and as a boy he debated whether he should be a musician or a painter. Cumberland records that once he heard the painter perform on his own home-made violin in a room hung with his own pictures—"a singular coincidence of arts in the person of one man."

Reviewing his life, I seem to see him drawing, like Paganini on a memorable occasion, exquisite strains from one string only—Romney of the one string—a fantasia on the beauty of fair and fragile women, pretty and graceful children, and delicate-visaged men, the sweetest sounds coming when he extemporised in praise of Emma, the "divine lady" who came into his life when he was forty-eight, and who renewed his youth.

The National Gallery possesses in "Mrs. Mark Currie," purchased in 1897, a typical and charming Romney. The pose, the reticent colour, the simplicity of the design, the background landscape, all please the eye. There is no sign of the labour that he bestowed upon his Shakespearean picture of "The Tempest," that formidable enterprise, containing eighteen figures, which was pruned and extended to meet suggestions of his friends.

Mrs. Mark Currie sits demurely self-conscious, as his quick eyes saw her in the first impressionistic glance, artfully clad in a simple muslin dress, relieved by the pale crimson sash and the ribbons of the same colour that nestle in fichu and sleeves. The fair hair is powdered; the large eyes gaze from the soft oval face conscious of, and content with, its comeliness; the landscape is sufficiently reminiscent of nature to harmonise with the pretty artificiality of the contented little lady who left Duke Street, Bloomsbury, to sit in the studio of "the man in Cavendish Square" on May 7, 14, 25, July 1, 9, 22, of the year 1789. "Paid for," continues the extract from the Diaries in theCatalogue Raisonné"in full by Mr. Currie, December 1790, £63; sent home June 20, 1791."

It was through Romney's influence that a delightful change towards simplicity and slight and delicate colours was made in the feminine fashions of his day, for he persuaded some of his sitters to discard the ugly, long-waisted bodices in favour of the simple white gown and fichu that Mrs. Mark Currie wears.

Emma Hart he clothed according to his fancy. I shall devote a separate chapter to her, but we must glance at his charming portrait of the "divine lady" as a Bacchante that hangs near Mrs. Mark Currie.

It is a study, possibly for the larger picture; the light brown curls, partly confined by the yellowy swathe, escape in disorder over the smooth brow. The mocking eyes glance sideways, the chin rests upon the shoulder, which, for Romney, is daringly bare; an impression, a momentary attitude, roughed in with his favourite red, done in a morning—a mood of Emma's, who could take any pose at an instant's notice, always charming and always inspiring to the painter. Near by is another sketch of Emma, rather hot in colour. The rich brown hair, in tempestuous disorder, flows over a pillow, the mouth is open, the eyes are as near to tragedy as the volatile Emma could go. So she must have looked during that weary time in Naples, when Charles Greville, of the level head and the tepid heart, whom she truly loved, would not write, and refused to reopen his arms to his young and deserted flame. "O, Grevell, what shall I dow? what shall I dow?" she wrote. At a Spelling Bee, Emma and Romney would have competed for the lowest place.

The oval known as "The Parson's Daughter," a title given by a former owner to the dainty girl with the large eyes and the tilted nose, is also essential Romney. She gave him no trouble, you may be sure. Easily as a thrush sings he painted the powdered hair framing the pretty face, the long neck springing from the slight body and the note of green in the auburn curls.

Country cousins who visit the National Gallery always pause before his "Lady with a Child," attracted by the naturalness of the little one, whose dark blue eyes gaze with reposeful wonder at the spectator, and by the clarity of the paint. Romney's genius for design rarely failed him when his subject was a girl, a mother and child, or children at play, such as the buoyant group of the little Gower family dancing in a ring. To realise how hard and tight his handling could be when not inspired by his subject, look at the early "Portraits of Mr. and Mrs. William Lindow," in the adjoining room, painted in Lancaster in 1770 before his visit to Italy. If this highly-glazed group was not duly catalogued under his name, one could hardly believe it to be a Romney.

PLATE VI.—MRS. ROBINSON—"PERDITA."

(From the picture in the Wallace Collection)

Hanging on the same wall in the Wallace Collection as Reynolds's seaward-gazing "Mrs. Robinson" and Gainsborough's superb full length, Romney's portrait of the famous lady is put to a severe test. Nevertheless, this small picture of "Perdita," with a muff, dressed for walking, looks very charming.

PLATE VI.—MRS. ROBINSON—"PERDITA."PLATE VI.—MRS. ROBINSON—"PERDITA."

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