Romney

portraits, like that of Mr. and Mrs. Lindow, which was painted in 1760 before he left Lancaster.

John Romney records an amusing instance of his father’s efforts in this respect. “I remember his telling me once,” he writes, “what difficulty he had with a sitter in order to accomplish a little expression. The gentleman was from the country, and an attorney; and though his profession required intelligence, yet his countenance gave no indication of it. To remove a settled dulness that pervaded his features, Mr. Romney made many attempts, starting every popular topic of conversation, but all in vain; at length by some uncommon chance, he happened to mention hunting; at the sound of which word a ray of animation immediately sparkled in the eyes of the sitter, and imparted a certain degree of vivacity to his countenance. Mr. Romney took his measure accordingly, and led him into the subject; after which he was relieved from any further attempts at conversation as the worthy gentleman expatiated upon it with spirit until the picture was finished.”

“Even upon persons to whom nature was less parsimonious of her favours,” he adds, “he knew that dulness would sometimes intrude, and, therefore, always wished that some friends should accompany his sitters, both for the purpose already mentioned, and also to relieve himself of the double task of painting and of keeping up a forced conversation at the same time.”

Lastly, for his classicism, which is the really distinguishing characteristic of Romney’s portraits and includes in it all the others. “On his arrival in Italy,” Flaxman tells us, “he was witness to new scenes of art, and sources of study ... he there contemplated the purity and perfection of ancient sculpture, the sublimity of Michel Angelo’s Sistine chapel, and the simplicity of Cimabue’s and Giotto’s schools. He perceived these qualities [namely, be it observed, sublimity and simplicity] distinctly, and judiciously used them in viewing and imitating nature; and thus his quick perception and unwearied application enabled him by a two years’ residence abroad to acquire as great a proficiency in art as is usually attained by foreign studies of much longer duration.” And again, “His cartoons ... were examples of the sublime and terrible at that time perfectly new in English art. The Dream of Atossa, from the Persians of Æschylus, contrasted the death-like sleep of the Queen with the Bacchanalian Fury of the Genius of Greece. The composition was conducted with the fire and severity of a Greek bas-relief.”

How many of the thousands of visitors to the National Gallery would ever imagine that this last paragraph was written of the painter of The Parson’s Daughter, or Mrs. Mark Currie? And yet here, I cannot help feeling, is the real strength which underlies the structure of even the airiest of Romney’s paintings. The roots of genius must grow deep if its branches are to grow high. The foundations of a great building must be firm. The faintest breeze of enlightened judgment is enough to blow away the ornamental bungalows of the Victorian portrait-painters, while castle Romney stands as firm as the rock on which it was built.

“In trying to attain excellence in his art,” Flaxman continues, “his diligence was unceasing as his gratification in the employment. He endeavoured to combine all the possible advantages of the subject immediately before him, and to exclude whatever had a tendency to weaken it. His compositions, like those of the ancient pictures and basso-relievos, told their story by a single group of figures in the front, whilst the background is made the simplest possible, rejecting all unnecessary episode and trivial ornament, either of secondary groups or architectural subdivision. In his compositions the beholder was forcibly struck by the sentiment at the first glance, the gradations and varieties of which he traced through several characters all conceived in an elevated spirit of dignity and beauty, with a lively expression of nature in all the parts.”

Although written of his classical compositions, this criticism of Flaxman, who was himself more severely classical in his art than the Greeks, applies with almost equal truth to his portraits. It throws into light the hidden force that gives them their strength, that keeps them before us as live men and women instead of painted puppets and dolls.

“His heads were various,” says Flaxman, still on the classical compositions, but holding the light even more closely to the portraits, “the male were decided and grand, the female lovely. His figures resembled the antique; the limbs were elegant, and finely formed. His drapery was well understood, either forming the figure into a mass with one or two deep folds only, or by its adhesion and transparency discovering the form of the figure, the lines of which were finely varied with the union or expansion of spiral or cascade folds, composing with or contrasting the outline and chiaroscuro. He was so passionately fond of Greek sculpture that he had filled his study and galleries with fine casts from the most perfect statues, groups, basso-relievos and busts of antiquity. He would sit and consider these in profound silence by the hour; and besides the studies in drawing and painting he made from them, he would examine them under all the changes of sunlight and daylight; and with lamps prepared on purpose at night he would try their effects lighted from above, beneath, in all directions, with rapturous admiration.”

Before considering the particulars in which these observations may be said to be applicable to Romney’s portraits, it is perhaps worth pointing out that the essential difference between the work of Reynolds and Romney is to be traced back to the influence exerted on each of them by his studies in Italy. Reynolds, perhaps fortunately for British art at the time, seems to have taken Michel Angelo and Raphael as the founders of painting, and to have confined his study of art, accordingly, to them and their successors. Romney, on the other hand, while also regarding them as the chiefs, went back from them to the antique, taking Cimabue and Giotto on the way. That he particularly admired Correggio is stated by Hayley, but that Correggio’s “tenderness and grace he often emulated very happily in his figures of women and children” is a piece of criticism which I must confess to be beyond me. Certainly it cannot be applied to his portraits.

“His drapery was well understood,” says Flaxman; I need not quote the rest of the sentence, because it applies in particular to the drapery of ladies in the classic period; but in principle, the drapery of Romney’s sitters is as simple, because well understood, as that of Atossa. Of all painters of women surely there never was one who required such extreme simplicity of raiment. The plainest of white or black robes seem to have been the rule, and the most common exception to absolute simplicity was not in the garment at all, but in the addition of a somewhat elaborate and umbrageous hat. Of any pattern on the drapery, I can only recall one instance, namely, that of Miss Hannah Milnes, a three-quarter length portrait, now in the possession of Earl Crewe. Here there seems to be something of the manner of Sir Joshua in several particulars, which is possibly a conscious imitation. But in portrait after portrait, and certainly in every piece which is most characteristic of Romney, whether it is Mrs. Jordan or Lady Hamilton or Mrs. Currie, the plain robe is the rule. The magnificent picture of Louisa Countess of Mansfield (in profile, seated under a tree) is now on loan from Lord Cathcart at the National Gallery, and is hanging close beside Mrs. Mark Currie’s; and while both depart from the letter of this rule, they depend for their magical effect upon the spirit of it. Lady Mansfield’s flowing robe is of a pale yellowish tinge, and a voluminous scarf of grey, almost as pale, mingles with the folds of drapery. But as contrasted with the deep shadows of the foliage against which the brightly coloured profile is set, the general impression is of an exquisitely posed figure in the simplest of flowing creamy white robes. No ornament fixes the eye, no violent contrast of colour interrupts the rhythm of the whole figure. “The design,” says Mr. Roberts in his Catalogue Raisonné, “appears to have been adopted from a Greek gem.”

Mrs. Currie’s dress, which I hope I am correct in describing as a frock, is of pure white; but it is faintly striped, not I think in colour, but in texture; and there are some bows on the elbows, and a sash of pale lake.

Anything less reminiscent of a Greek statue than this radiant young English beauty in a muslin frock, I am quite willing to admit, it would be difficult to think of. At first sight a severely classical taste would be more likely to condemn her for the

unmitigated prettiness that is usually associated with the cheapest kind of pictorial imbecility. But let her not be condemned unheard. That she was an exceedingly pretty woman need hardly be doubted, and that she wished to be made as pretty as possible in her portrait may fairly be taken for granted. If she had any other qualities it is probable that her name would be remembered for them. As it is, Romney has conscientiously painted a portrait of her which probably pleased her almost as much as it pleases all of us to-day. “In his composition,” we remember, “the beholder was forcibly struck by the sentiment at the first glance.” How true this is of Mrs. Currie and her prettiness! The painter’s whole effort is concentrated on that one quality, and instead of dissipating the beholder’s attention with accessories, he soothes it with a seeming artlessness which no one but a great painter could nearly accomplish. Mrs. Currie’s drapery is of course strictly English—in substance at any rate and form. But here again we feel the guiding or restraining hand of the Classic Muse, just as we should have seen it had Romney been painting Mrs. Currie in the character of Antigone. As it was, Romney was speaking English and not Greek; only it is the English, as it were, of a finely educated man.

But in placing Romney so high above the crowd of ordinary portrait painters, and a little higher than any except Reynolds and Gainsborough, it is only fair to consider how far short he fell of equalling those two. And it must not be forgotten that the limitations which he imposed upon himself were quite as likely to affect his popularity among his patrons and their friends as with posterity. Classic simplicity is an invaluable quality in the portraiture of everyday men and women, especially when the latter are young and pretty; but a gallery of portraits by Romney would afford a much narrower view of the capabilities of the English School than a similar exhibition of the work of Reynolds or Gainsborough. The oft-repeated assertion of Lord Chancellor Thurlow that “Reynolds and Romney divide the town, and I am of the Romney faction,” must be taken with a considerably larger pinch of salt than is popularly accepted with it. In the first place, Romney was not at all in fashion until after his return from Rome in 1785, by which time Reynolds had been painting portraits for at least twenty years. Gainsborough, too, who was by seven years the senior of Romney, was quite as many years ahead of him in practice, though he had only recently come to London from Bath. In the year 1785 we know that Romney earned £3635 from portraits. At this time, so his pupil Robinson records, his prices were £20 for a head, £30 for a kit-cat, £40 for a half-length, and £80 for a whole length. Taking the average at as low a figure as £35, this means about a hundred commissions in his busiest year. This is certainly a large number, and Sir Joshua never had more than a hundred-and-fifty in a year; but it must not be taken as an average for any great length of years.

Again, when we look at the names of his most distinguished patrons, the list is not as long or as imposing as those of Reynolds and Gainsborough. The latter had the patronage of Royalty, besides a good number of the aristocracy, while Reynolds had, if I may be allowed the expression, “mopped up” all that was most brilliant in beauty, birth, and genius, leaving very little for anybody else. The Catalogue of the Exhibition of National Portraits held at South Kensington in 1867, enumerates but twenty pictures by Romney, and as many as a hundred and fifty by Reynolds.

That Romney’s sensitive disposition and retiring habit of life may in some degree account for his not being more widely popular in his own time is no doubt true. But apart from any other consideration there is no question that a fine portrait by Reynolds is a more satisfying possession than any but the very finest by Romney, and a characteristic one by Gainsborough more exhilarating. Though there is at least one instance in which he “wiped Reynolds’s eye,” namely, with his magnificent head of John Wesley, which was painted in 1789, when Wesley was eighty-six years old. “At the earnest desire of Mrs T.,” the old man wrote, “I once more sat for my picture. Mr. Romney is a painter

indeed! He struck off an exact likeness at once, and did more in an hour than Sir Joshua did in ten.”

Still, there is a variety of qualities in Reynolds’s and Gainsborough’s pictures that we do not find, or expect to find, in those of Romney—a fact which must be taken into account in comparing the number of their respective portraits exhibited in 1867. The stream of popular taste steadily ebbed during the century following Sir Joshua’s death, and it is only of late years that Romney has been “discovered” and restored to public favour. A great deal of Romney’s present-day popularity I cannot help thinking is attributable as much to the delectable quality of his ladies’ faces as to the classic simplicity of treatment which makes them what they are.

Then, of course, there is Lady Hamilton, to whom, as we find Allan Cunningham asserting, many have imputed the chief charm of Romney’s best pictures. In these days it is certainly true that her name is inseparably associated with Romney’s art in the popular mind, and the latest addition to the bibliography of Romney is concerned with nothing but Lady Hamilton. Unfortunately for Romney’s reputation both inside and outside his painting-room, this lady’s fame has so filled the public ear with matters which are altogether distinct from the art of painting, that it is almost impossible to appreciate her influence upon Romney’s art in anything like its proper proportions. We are as it were between two fires—the glamour which she threw over the painter and the glamour which he threw over her; and our view of the matter, unless we are careful to screen our eyes, is likely to be too highly coloured for the ordinary purposes of criticism.

The broad fact seems to be that for nearly a decade the inspiration of Emma Lyon poured like sunlight into Romney’s studio, and although before it came he had for several years established his reputation and done some of his best work in portraiture, its withdrawal, in 1791, was the end of all that was happy or successful in his career. “His imagination was gone,” says Mr. Humphry Ward; “his health, for many years frail, became less robust than ever, and of his portraits and pictures painted after 1791, many exhibit signs of decaying powers.”

That he was exceedingly fond of her need not, of course, be doubted. How could it be otherwise? But is it any more necessary to dwell upon his purely personal relations with her than on those of Sir Joshua Reynolds with Kitty Fisher or Nelly O’Brien? For Reynolds, those two “professional beauties” were sitters, of whom the painter succeeded in painting several beautiful and accomplished portraits. For Romney, Emma Lyon was to some extent the embodiment of the Muse whom I have ventured to postulate as his guardian angel, when engaged in the perilous commerce of painting pretty and fashionable ladies. That she was also the veritable embodiment of all that was pleasing to the mortal eye in the shape of woman is at least equally certain; but unlike so many of her frail sisters, she was a remarkably accomplished and intelligent woman. “She performed both in the serious and comic to admiration,” writes Romney, in a letter describing an evening at Sir William Hamilton’s, “both in singing and acting. Her Nina surpasses everything I ever saw, and I believe as a piece of acting nothing ever surpassed it. The whole company were in an agony of sorrow. Her acting is simple, grand, terrible, and pathetic.”

In another letter, to Hayley in June 1791, he writes, “At present, and the greatest part of the summer, I shall be engaged in painting pictures from the divine lady. I cannot give her any other epithet, for I think her superior to all womankind. I have two pictures to paint of her for the Prince of Wales. She says she must see you.... She asked me if you would not write my life. I told her you had begun it. Then she said she hoped you would have much to say of her in the life, as she prided herself in being my model.” And again in the following month “I dedicate my time to this charming lady; there is a prospect of her leaving town with Sir William for two or three weeks. They are very much hurried at present, as everything is going on for their speedy marriage, and all the world following and talking of her, so that if she had not more good sense than vanity her brain must be turned.

“The pictures I have begun are Joan of Arc, a Magdalen, and a Bacchante, for the Prince of Wales,

and another I am to begin as a companion to the Bacchante. I am also to paint a picture of Constance for the Shakespeare Gallery.”

The extent of Romney’s obligations to her, simply as a model, may be gathered from a glance at Mr. Roberts’s Catalogue Raisonné of his work. Here we find forty-five different pictures of the fair Emma, a figure which is about doubled if we count the various versions painted of one and another—as a Bacchante, for example, no less than twelve separate canvases are enumerated. Nor does this catalogue probably include a good many sketches and studies which were left unfinished. Of the various characters in which he painted her, apart from pictures which were simply portraits, the list includes those of Alope, Ariadne, a Bacchante, Cassandra, Circe, Comedy, the Comic Muse, Contemplation, Euphrosyne, a Gipsy, Iphigenia, Joan of Arc, a Magdalen, Meditation, Miranda, Nature, a Nun, a Pythian Priestess, S. Cecilia, Sensibility, a Shepherdess, Sigismunda, the Spinstress. The Sempstress, it may be mentioned, was not painted from her, but from Miss Vernon.

Such a catalogue as this is, I suppose, unique in the annals of painting. Oddly enough it is paralleled in those of literature—if it be not thought too fanciful to quote the example of William Shakespeare. For fanciful as at first thought it may seem, it is, nevertheless, helpful to an understanding of the relations of the private life of each to his particular art.

George Romney, like Shakespeare, was born of humble parents in a remote country town. Dalton, in Lancashire, is further from London than Stratford, but as I do not pretend to draw the parallel too closely, I will confine myself to a short account of Romney’s circumstances only. He was born on December 15, 1734. His ancestors, yeomen of good repute, lived near Appleby, in Westmorland, but took refuge during the Civil Wars in the neighbouring county. His father was a joiner, which in those days included the trade of carpenter and cabinet-maker, and George was apprenticed to him. How and at what period the love of painting came upon him has not been clearly shown. Cumberland asserts that it was inspired by the cuts in the

Universal Magazine. Hayley says that he consumed the time of his fellow-workmen in sketching them in various attitudes, while John Romney states that Lionardo’s treatise on painting, illustrated by many fine engravings, was early in his hands. Cumberland describes him as “a child of nature who had never seen or heard of anything that could elicit his genius or urge him to emulation, and who became a painter without a prototype.” At nineteen, however, he was apprenticed for four years to a painter called Count Steele, who was practising in the neighbouring town of Kendal. During this time he fell in love with a young lady of some little fortune, Mary Abbot, and on October 14, 1756, he carried her across the border to Gretna Green and married her.

His precipitate marriage drew upon him the rebuke of his parents, but he vindicated himself with some firmness and skill. “If you consider everything deliberately,” he wrote, “you will find it to be the best affair that ever happened to me; because if I have fortune I shall make a better painter than I should otherwise have done, as it will be a spur to my application; and my thoughts being now still, and not obstructed by youthful follies, I can practise with more diligence and success than ever.”

According to Hayley, he soon perceived that his marriage was an obstacle to his studies; that he was ruined as an artist, and that he might bid farewell to all hopes of fame and glory, although he was devoting himself with all his might to his work. “The terror of precluding himself from those distant honours,” says Hayley—to whom, by-the-by, we are under no obligation to believe more than we wish—“by appearing in the world as a young married man, agitated the ambitious artist almost to distraction, and made him resolve very soon after his marriage, as he had no means of breaking the fetters which he wildly regarded as inimical to the improvement and exertion of his genius, to hide them as much as possible from his troubled fancy.”

This exordium of Hayley’s is, as it were, in the nature of a “preliminary announcement” of the separation between Romney and his wife, when five years later he resolved to try his fortune in London.

“In working rapidly and patiently at different places in the north, for a few years,” Hayley continues, “by painting heads as large as life at the price of two guineas or figures at whole length on a small scale for six guineas, he contrived to raise a sum amounting almost to a hundred pounds; taking thirty for his own travelling expenses, and leaving the residue to support an unoffending partner and two children, he set forth alone, without even a letter of recommendation, to try the chances of life in the metropolis.”

That was in 1762; and for a much longer period than Shakespeare, and with no occasional visits to his family, Romney worked in London and became more and more famous, until, as we have seen, his decline set in.

“The summer of 1799 came,” writes Allan Cunningham, “but Romney could neither enjoy the face of nature, nor feel pleasure in his studio and gallery. A visible mental languor sat upon his brow—not diminishing but increasing; he had laid aside his pencils; his swarm of titled sitters, whose smile in other days rendered passing time so agreeable, were moved off to a Lawrence, a Shee, or a Beechey; and thus left lonely and disconsolate among whole cartloads of paintings, which he had not the power to complete, his gloom and his weakness gathered and grew upon him.... In these moments his heart and his eye turned towards the north—where his son, a man affectionate and kind, resided; and where his wife, surviving the cold neglect and long estrangement of her husband, lived yet to prove the depth of a woman’s love, and show to the world that she would have been more worthy of appearing at his side, even when earls sat for their pictures, and Lady Hamilton was enabling him to fascinate princes with his Calypsos and Cassandras. Romney departed from Hampstead, and taking the northern coach arrived among his friends at Kendal in the summer of 1799. The exertion of travelling and the presence of her whom he once had warmly loved overpowered him; he grew more languid and more weak, and finding fireside happiness he resolved to remain where he was; he purchased a house and authorised the sale of that on Hampstead Hill.”

So much for the parallel as concerned the private life of either. But what about his art? Where in Shakespeare’s literary career are we to find anything comparable with the influence of Emma Lyon on Romney’s painting during the crowning decade of his accomplishment? I suggest as the answer, that during a similar period, of about the same duration, namely from about 1593 to 1603, we may trace a similar influence on the poet, which is embodied in a series of masterpieces numbering over a hundred, namely, most if not all, of the first hundred and twenty-five of “Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” They were all written to one person, and in such terms of art as have led others besides Alexander Dyce to suppose that they were really addressed to the poet’s muse rather than to any corporeal being. As in the case of Romney, the author has been maligned by the undiscerning vulgar for supposed deviations from the strict path of virtue in his relations with his friend. But for any one who has an understanding of the spirit of art there is nothing in either case to support the allegation. Had Shakespeare and Romney looked no farther than their own hearths for artistic inspiration, the world would have been the poorer: that is all.

Of Romney’s classical or historical pictures the world knows almost as little as it cares about them. “I have made many grand designs,” he himself wrote in 1794, “I have formed a system of original subjects, moral and my own, and I think one of the grandest that has been thought of—but nobody knows it.” Cunningham, after disposing shortly of his portraits, proceeds to state that the historical and domestic pictures, finished and unfinished, deserve a more minute examination; that they embrace a wide range of reading and observation and are numerous beyond all modern example. But with the exception of Titania and her Indian Votaries and Milton Dictating to his Daughters, which were mentioned by Flaxman, and various fancy portraits of Lady Hamilton, he does not specify a single finished example. His explanation is that “for one finely finished there are five half done, and for five half done there are at least a dozen merely commenced on the canvas.”

So far as these canvases are concerned, there is no doubt that the majority of them have been destroyed; but there are still in existence a large quantity of drawings and sketches on paper, both in pencil and in India ink, for classical compositions. As many of these are probably rough ideas for his lost pictures, it is perhaps worth mentioning a few of the subjects enumerated by Cunningham among the unfinished productions, which may help to identify the sketches, besides, as Cunningham says, “showing the range of his mind, and also his want of patience to render his works worthy of admission to public galleries.” The principal are as follows: King Lear Asleep, King Lear Awake, Ceyx and Alcyone, The Death of Niobe’s Children, The Cumean Sibyl Foretelling the Destiny of Aeneas, Electra and Orestes at the Tomb of Agammemnon, Thetis Supplicating Jupiter, Thetis Comforting Achilles, Damon and Musidora, Homer Reciting his Verses, David and Saul, Macbeth and Banquo, The Descent of Odin, The Ghost of Clytemnestra, Eurydice vanishing from Orpheus, Harpalice, A Thracian Princess defending her wounded Father, Antigone with the Corpse of Polynices, A Witch displaying her Magical Powers, Resuscitation by Force of Magic, Doll Tearsheet, Cupid and Psyche.

Besides these there are a number of portrait sketches, which though not so numerous, are much more charming, in spite of their being exceedingly rough and slight. They must have been simply notes, and can seldom have been intended for more than fixing an idea in the painter’s mind. I have as many as a dozen in my own possession which I have picked up here and there in the dealers’ portfolios, and there are probably a good number of them in existence. Rough as they are, they are certainly deserving of more attention than is usually accorded to them; for though Romney never seems to have enjoyed the process of committing a portrait to paper as Gainsborough did, these business-like notes of pose and chiaroscuro give us a good insight into his methods of setting to work. Perhaps the taste of a future generation will prefer the rough-hewn idea of a great portrait painter to the finished achievement of Benwell or Buck in little.

INDEX

B, C, D, E, F, G, H, K, M, N, P, R, S, T, V, W

Boydell, Alderman, 26

Cathcart, Lord, 35
Chamberlin, Mason, 2
Cimabue, 5, 30, 34
Copley, John Singleton, 8
Copley’s Death of Chatham, 9
Correggio, 34
Cumberland, 23, 46
Cunningham, Allan, 13, 19, 41
Currie, Mrs. Mark, 3, 31, 35, 36

Dalton, 46

Exhibition of National Portraits, 40

Flaxman, John, R.A., 15, 30, 31, 32, 34
Fuseli, Henry, R.A., 9

Gainsborough, Thomas, 11, 16, 17, 28, 40
Garrick, David, 23, 24
Giotto, 30, 34

Hamilton, Lady, 13, 41-43
influence on Romney’s painting, 51
Romney’s portraits of, 45
Hayley, William, 13, 25, 47
influence over Romney, 14, 20
Highmore, 23
Hogarth, William, 23
Holbein, Hans, 5

Kauffmann, Angelica, 9

Michelangelo, 30, 34

Northcote, James, R.A., 7

Pictures by George Romney
Bacchante, 44
Constance, 45
Joan of Arc, 44
John Wesley, 40
Lady Gower and her Children, 20
Lady Hamilton, 3, 35
Louisa, Countess of Mansfield, 35, 36
Magdalen, 44
Milton dictating to his Daughters, 52
Miss Hannah Milnes, 35
Mr. and Mrs. Lindow, 29
Mr. Leigh and his Family, 23
Mrs. Jordan, 35
Mrs. Yates as The Tragic Muse, 25
The Dream of Atossa, 31
The Parson’s Daughter, 3, 31
“The Triumphs of Temper,” 13
The Warren Family, 21
Titania and her Indian Votaries, 52
“Tragic Muse,” 26

Raphael, 34
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 4, 5, 7, 11, 16, 28, 34, 40
Roberts, Mr., Catalogue Raisonné, 36, 45
Romney, George, birth of, 46
apprenticed to joinery, 46
apprenticeship to Count Steele, 47
classicism, 30
conscientiousness, 28
distaste for portrait painting, 4
first full-length portrait of a lady, 26
influence of Hayley upon, 14
in London, 49
letters to Hayley, 44
life of, by William Hayley, 13
marriage to Mary Abbot at Gretna Green, 47
place among portrait painters, 38
portraits compared with those of Reynolds and Gainsborough, 18
prices obtained for pictures, 39
principal pictures, list of, 53, 54
return to Kendal, 50
separation from his wife, 48
simplicity of treatment, 27
Romney, Rev. John, 13, 21, 29, 47

Shakespeare Gallery, 45
Shakespeare, William, 46

Thurlow, Lord Chancellor, 38

Vandyck, 5
Velasquez, 5
Vernon, Lord, 22

Walpole, Horace, 12
Ward, Mr. Humphry, 23, 42
West, Benjamin, 7
West’s “Pylades and Orestes,” 7
Wilson, Richard, Founder of the English School of Landscape, 6

PRINTED AT
THE BALLANTYNE PRESS
LONDON