GEORGE ROMNEY, MASTER PORTRAITIST
by Joan K. Yanni
Editor’s note: When frame expert Bill Adair examined MAG’s frames in 1999, he noted that the lavish golden frame on the Maitland portrait is probably original.
Why do museums, including MAG, display unfinished paintings? To show the way an artist thinks and works. The Gallery’s unfinished portrait of Nathaniel Hurd by Copley is familiar to everyone, especially now that it is the focus of the Gill Discovery Room installation. MAG has another interesting portrait that is unfinished: George Romney’s Portrait of Lady Maitland (77.2) on view in the 18th-century European gallery. A second Romney portrait, Portrait of Colonel James Clitherow (76.24), hangs nearby in the same gallery.
Lady Maitland reveals Romney’s working method. He first sketched out his composition; next, he concentrated on the face of the sitter. Then he began adding background around the head, looking for the color that would be most effective. Here, a dark, rich brown predominates, though the extreme left side and lower left corner of the painting remain unfinished. The face of the sitter, a three-quarter view, is apparently complete. Her upper body, shoulders and hair are sketched lightly. Finished or not, the painting shows a lovely, spirited woman with the beginnings of a smile—and a sense of humor? The sitter is Eleanor Todd, who became Lady Maitland after she married James, Viscount Maitland, Eighth Earl of Lauderdale. Romney also painted a full-length portrait of her.
George Romney (1734-1802) is considered one of the great 18th-century English portrait painters. The Grove Encyclopedia of Art ranks him third after Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, though followers of Sir Henry Raeburn might object to this rating. Thanks to George Eastman, who collected 18th-century English portraits as well as Old Masters, MAG owns these Romneys as well as Portrait of Miss Hoare by Reynolds (77.1), Man with Book Seated in a Landscape by Gainsborough (75.115) and two Raeburns: Mrs. Johnson of Straiton (78.6) and Portrait of General Hay MacDowell (68.102). (In her MAGnum Opus, page 84, Betsy Brayer reports that Eastman kept paintings “on approval” for months and sometimes longer before deciding whether he liked them. The MacDowell portrait was sent back to the dealer as a reject until Eastman found that he missed it and ordered it returned.)
Romney was born in Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire. Until he was 21 he worked for his father, a cabinetmaker. In 1755 he was apprenticed to the itinerant British portrait painter Christopher Steele. With some income from the apprenticeship, he married in 1756 and set up a portrait studio in Kendall in 1757. We know that his fee at the time was two guineas for a three-quarter-length portrait and six for a full-length one, but little work from these years survives.
In 1762 Romney went to London and set up a studio, leaving his wife and family in Kendall. He became popular almost immediately for his historical subjects and flattering portraitsof British society. His first exhibited painting was The Death of General Wolfe, now lost, which was judged second at the Society of Arts exhibit in 1763. In late August, 1764, he set out for Paris with a friend. They stayed six weeks, visiting palaces, churches and art collections, but Romney was unimpressed by the contemporary French art that he saw. Instead, he admired the art of the time of Louis XIV, calling it “very great.”
By the mid eighteenth century, it had become part of an artist’s education to go to Italy; and in March 1773 Romney left with Osias Humphrey, a painter of miniatures, for the continent. Despite leaving a busy, lucrative practice, he stayed away for two years. In Italy he made careful studies of antique busts and Old Masters, particularly Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian.
Back in England, only a year after his return, his practice was again a staggering success, and his paintings showed a new depth of feeling, though line rather than color dominated his works. By 1786 he had three to six sittings a day, and one or on a Sunday. His price, lower than that of either Reynolds or Gainsborough, may have attracted sitters. He charged 20 guineas for a three-quarter-length portrait, while Gainsborough’s price was 30 and Reynolds’s 50 guineas. His works pleased, too, because he concentrated on surface qualities of skin, hair and fabric, subordinating character to elegant patterns and flattering compositions.
Despite this success (at times he rivaled Reynolds in popularity), Romney was still eager to become a history painter. One of the models for historical scenes was Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton, whom he met in 1781. Ultimately he painted her almost fifty times, in many roles, and sketched her even . Lady Hamilton as Psyche, Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante, and Lady Hamilton at the Spinning Wheel—even a portrait of Lady Hamilton as Joan of Arc appeared on canvas. He became enchanted, even obsessed, with her; yet most of the pictures of her were painted from memory.
Romney never became a member of the Royal Academy, and though he knew many of his fellow artists, his friendships were in literary and philosophical circles. He was by nature introspective and moody, and in the late 1780s his health began to deteriorate. In 1790, however, he traveled to Paris, met Greuze and David, and again began to think of history painting. He began project after project, but his desire to paint serious subjects resulted in thousands of drawings but few paintings.
The deaths of Gainsborough in 1788 and of Reynolds in 1792 spurred him on to projects, and he began to plan a Birth of Man series. But again his health failed and the number of unfinished paintings increased until a stroke virtually forced him to stop painting. Though his reputation faded almost immediately after his death in 1802, his paintings are now in most major museums.
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