DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68073#0422
396
OLD WORLD MASTERS
Diaries show his amazing industry and a golden register of the nobility
and gentry besides people of fashion and artistic distinction. The
year 1777, for instance, shows six hundred sittings which Mr. Ward
calculates as representing from a hundred and twenty to a hundred
and fifty finished portraits. Romney’s charming style was now fully
developed and some of his loveliest portraits date from this period:
the Countess of Warwick and her Children; Lady Susan Lenox; Lady
Derby (see page 401); Lady Albemarle; Lord Gower’s Children Dancing;
John Walter Tempest; and Lady Craven, which inspired Horace Wal-
pole to write:
“ Full many an artist has on canvas fix’d
All charms that Nature’s pencil ever mix’d—
The Witchery of Eyes, the Grace that tips
The inexpressible douceur of Lips
Romney alone, in this fair image caught
Each Charm’s Expression and each Feature’s thought.
And shows how in their sweet assemblage sit
Taste, Spirit, Softness, Sentiment, and Wit.”—H. W.
Therefore, it will be seen that Romney had been producing beautiful
work before the advent of the beautiful Emma Hart, the future Lady
Hamilton.
Romney left Cavendish Square in 1798, having bought a house
at Hollybush Hill, Hampstead, from which he removed two years
later to return to his wife and son at Kendal. He bought the estate
of Whitestock, near Ulverstone, where his son finished the house he
did not live to complete. Romney died in 1802, having been for two or
three years in a state of complete imbecility.
“For the first half-century or more after his death his work was
neglected. Hidden in private houses, the public never saw it; his
biographies did not interest people; he had left no group of influential
friends to hand down his memory. There was no such machinery of
celebrity in his case as had existed so abundantly in Sir Joshua’s who
lived not only by his pictures but by a multitude of lovely engravings
and by the written and spoken word of colleagues, pupils, and friends.
So Romney’s fame may almost be said to have died away during the
dark ages between 1820 and 1850; and Christie’s Catalogues show that
OLD WORLD MASTERS
Diaries show his amazing industry and a golden register of the nobility
and gentry besides people of fashion and artistic distinction. The
year 1777, for instance, shows six hundred sittings which Mr. Ward
calculates as representing from a hundred and twenty to a hundred
and fifty finished portraits. Romney’s charming style was now fully
developed and some of his loveliest portraits date from this period:
the Countess of Warwick and her Children; Lady Susan Lenox; Lady
Derby (see page 401); Lady Albemarle; Lord Gower’s Children Dancing;
John Walter Tempest; and Lady Craven, which inspired Horace Wal-
pole to write:
“ Full many an artist has on canvas fix’d
All charms that Nature’s pencil ever mix’d—
The Witchery of Eyes, the Grace that tips
The inexpressible douceur of Lips
Romney alone, in this fair image caught
Each Charm’s Expression and each Feature’s thought.
And shows how in their sweet assemblage sit
Taste, Spirit, Softness, Sentiment, and Wit.”—H. W.
Therefore, it will be seen that Romney had been producing beautiful
work before the advent of the beautiful Emma Hart, the future Lady
Hamilton.
Romney left Cavendish Square in 1798, having bought a house
at Hollybush Hill, Hampstead, from which he removed two years
later to return to his wife and son at Kendal. He bought the estate
of Whitestock, near Ulverstone, where his son finished the house he
did not live to complete. Romney died in 1802, having been for two or
three years in a state of complete imbecility.
“For the first half-century or more after his death his work was
neglected. Hidden in private houses, the public never saw it; his
biographies did not interest people; he had left no group of influential
friends to hand down his memory. There was no such machinery of
celebrity in his case as had existed so abundantly in Sir Joshua’s who
lived not only by his pictures but by a multitude of lovely engravings
and by the written and spoken word of colleagues, pupils, and friends.
So Romney’s fame may almost be said to have died away during the
dark ages between 1820 and 1850; and Christie’s Catalogues show that