ROMNEY, REYNOLDS, AND OTHERS
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 his _protege_, 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--
"... made
The wife of wives a widow bride, and lost
Salvation 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 L4000
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.
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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.
[Illustration: PLATE IV.--THE PARSON'S DAUGHTER: A Portrait.]
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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 the _European
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 indispensable _Catalogue Raisonne_ by 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 woe
In thy incomparable work appear."
It is poor stuff; but better than the effusions of Hayley, Miss Seward,
and John Halliday.