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George Romney (1734-1802)
The year 2002 marks the bi-centenary
of the death of George Romney, one of the leading artists in
Britain during the last quarter of the 18th century. Romney was
born and died in the north-west, although he made his name in
London. At the height of his career he was more fashionable than
Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough as a society portraitist,
but all his life he wanted to paint elevated historical and literary
subjects. He lacked the confidence to carry out many of his most
ambitious projects, but in the last fifteen years of his working
life, under the spell of his favourite model and muse Emma Hart,
later the celebrated Lady Hamilton, he produced a sequence of
Shakespearean and other fancy subjects which count among the
most imaginative and poetic canvases of their time.
The association of Romney's name
with Lady Hamilton's in the Victorian era contributed to the
subsequent eclipse of his reputation as a serious artist. In
the 20th century, Romney was gradually re-evaluated as a brilliant,
spontaneous draughtsman whose mind teemed with ideas, but who
lacked the application to turn his sketches into finished works.
Romney's mature drawings were recognised as having been highly
influential on a group of younger contemporaries such as John
Flaxman and William Blake, and their modernity has appealed to
many twentieth-century artists.
This is the first ever exhibition
which surveys the whole range of Romney's art, from his grandest
full-length portraits to the tiny thumbnail studies preserved
in sketchbooks. It reveals an ambitious and progressive artist
who developed and re-invented himself continuously.
Romney's
Early Career
Romney was born on the outskirts of Dalton-in-Furness in 1734.
From 1755 to 1757 he was apprenticed in Kendal to Christopher
Steele, a roving provincial portraitist who had been trained
by the noted French artist Carle van Loo. Romney's early style,
with its bright colour and precocious skill with drapery, reflects
this background. He was also influenced by the north-west's leading
artist, Arthur Devis. Devis specialised in small-scale, whole-length
portraits in carefully observed indoor and outdoor settings and
was one of the first masters of the conversation piece, a distinctively
English brand of portraiture closely attuned to middle-class
pursuits and sensibilities.
Working in Kendal and Lancaster,
Romney became a favourite portraitist with local patrons. He
also made a handful of more elaborate, experimental paintings
such as the remarkable
King Lear in the Tempest Tearing off
his Robes
(cat. 7), the first product of his lifelong fascination
with Shakespeare. In 1762, ambitious to succeed as a history
painter, Romney left the north-west for London. Exchanging a
life of local celebrity for one of obscurity in the capital,
he embarked on a period of financial hardship as he struggled
to make his reputation. Few paintings survive from his first
four years there, and he was twice obliged to return briefly
to the north-west, where he could count on receiving commissions.
Towards
the Grand Manner
Returning to London after his second trip home, in 1767, Romney
moved into new lodgings in Great Newport Street, near Covent
Garden. This was a turning point in his career. For the first
time he had a painting room large enough to carry out whole-length
portraits in the grand manner popularised over the previous decade
by Joshua Reynolds.
The Leigh Family
(cat. 19), an unconventional,
almost heroic mixture of conversation piece and classical frieze,
was the first fruit of his move.
Exhibited to great acclaim in
1768,
The Leigh Family
plunged Romney into competition
with Reynolds. Over the next four years Romney painted a series
of ambitious works which appear to have been designed to publicly
upstage Reynolds, newly-elected first President of the Royal
Academy. Portraits such as
Mrs. Yates as the Tragic Muse
(cat.
35) show his adeptness with the vocabulary of neo-classicism,
in which pose, costume, props and even the handling of pictorial
space combine to give the work a fashionable suggestion of classical
antiquity. However, many of the patrons most likely to recognise
Romney's mastery of this style would be less impressed that he
had not yet studied its sources at first hand, in Italy. Recognising
this, Romney left London for Rome in March 1773.
Cavendish
Square
Romney returned from Italy in July 1775 and a few months later
moved into expensive new premises in Cavendish Square. The gamble
paid off. He quickly attracted many new patrons and within three
years was the most fashionable portrait painter in London.
The
Leveson-Gower Children
(cat. 58), his portrait of the five
youngest children of one of the best-connected aristocrats in
England, was a set-piece demonstration of his capabilities. It
set the tone for many of his best later portraits: broadly and
informally painted, but with a subtle sense of design.
Romney remained the leading society
portraitist in London until well into the 1790s, despite his
radical political sympathies, which became clear after the outbreak
of the French Revolution in 1789. He complained increasingly
of being 'shackled' to portraiture, and for much of his later
career he tried to break free to paint more imaginative literary
and historical pictures. Shakespeare's plays, which remained
his favourite literary source, inspired him to produce some of
the most poetic and visionary paintings executed in England towards
the close of the 18th century.
Romney's Draughtsmanship
For Romney, drawing came as naturally as breathing. He started
to draw long before he began his apprenticeship as a painter,
and in his declining years, he remained a powerful draughtsman
long after mounting depression and infirmity had sapped his will
to paint. His approach to painting was underpinned by the language
of drawing, laying stress on outline, direct expression, simplicity
and spontaneity.
Four chief stylistic phases are
distinguishable in Romney's drawings. Up until the end of the
1760s a delicate pencil technique, the expression of a slightly
tentative artistic personality, predominates, most notably in
the
Kendal Sketchbook
(cat. 10). This gave way, around
1770, to more confident drawings in pen and ink, suggestive of
greater maturity in a rapid, jagged style. After 1775, under
the impact of his visit to Italy, Romney began to use sepia and
later black wash over lyrical pen outlines. This technique gave
full expression to the summary nature of his vision, concentrating
powerfully on essentials and eliminating incidental detail. Later
still, from around 1790, Romney's drawing became even more reductive
as his obsessive rehearsal of complex figure motifs intensified.
He returned increasingly to pencil to explore abstract effects
of mass and light and shade, abandoning his interest in outline,
beauty of form, or expression.
The Cartoons
Executed in black chalk on six or nine sheets of paper glued
together at the edges, the cartoons are a unique aspect of Romney's
work. The sculptor John Flaxman described them as "examples
of the sublime and terrible, at that time perfectly new in English
art". Romney began making them in the mid-1770s, either
towards the end of his stay in Rome or immediately after his
return to London. In Rome, Romney had worked in the circle of
the Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, who made highly finished,
monochrome drawings on historical subjects intended to compete
with paintings at public exhibitions. Although his cartoons were
larger and more severe in style than Fuseli's drawings, Romney
initially seems to have envisaged them as operating in the same
way, as 'virtual paintings' rather than as preparatory studies
- the traditional function of cartoons for earlier artists.
Romney made cartoons for about
ten years, using them to explore subjects from classical and
modern literature with which he closely identified. Although
they appear controlled in comparison with his smaller, more spontaneous
drawings, it would be a mistake to regard them as the final distillation
of his ideas about the subjects concerned. Drawn at night after
hours of work on portrait commissions, they acted as a release
for his energies and were the expression of his most powerful
creative urges.
From the first, the cartoons'
fragile medium and construction placed them at risk. Some are
known to have been destroyed in Romney's lifetime. The eighteen
in the collection of the Walker Art Gallery are the only ones
now known to survive. They were presented to the Liverpool Royal
Institution in 1823 by the artist's son, who had already had
to conserve them. Later restorations have altered their appearance
further still.
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