Soon he was in the full tide of prosperity. He removed to Great Newport Street, near the residence of Sir Joshua, whose fame in portraiture he began to rival in such works as “Sir George and Lady Warren” and “Mrs Yates as the Tragic Muse”; and his professional income rose to £1200 a year. But this marked increase in his popularity had the effect of enlarging his ambitions, and he became anxious to attempt subjects which required more experience than he possessed. Realizing as he did the need for more thorough knowledge, he was seized with a longing to study in Italy; and in the beginning of 1773 he started for Rome in company with Ozias Humphrey, the miniature painter. On his arrival he separated himself from his fellow-traveller and his countrymen, and devoted himself to solitary study, raising a scaffold to examine the paintings in the Vatican, and giving much time to work from the undraped model, of which his painting of a “Wood Nymph” was a fine and graceful result. At Parma he concentrated himself upon the productions of Correggio, which fascinated him and greatly influenced his practice.
In 1775 Romney returned to London, establishing himself in Cavendish Square, and resuming his extensive and lucrative employment as a portrait painter, which in 1785, according to the estimate of his pupil Robinson, yielded him an income of over £3600. The admiration of the town was divided between him and Reynolds. “There are two factions in art,” said Lord Thurlow, “and I am of the Romney faction”—and the remark, and the rivalry which it implied, caused much annoyance to Sir Joshua, who was accustomed to refer contemptuously to the younger painter as “the man in Cavendish Square.” After his return from Italy Romney formed two friendships which powerfully influenced his life. He became acquainted with Hayley, his future biographer, then in the zenith of his little-merited popularity as a poet. His influence on the painter seems to have been far from salutary. Weak himself, he flattered the weaknesses of Romney, encouraged his excessive and morbid sensibility, disturbed him with amateurish fancies and suggestions, and tempted him to expend on slight rapid sketches, and ill-considered, seldom-completed paintings of ideal and poetical subjects, talents which would have found fitter exercise in the steady pursuit of portraiture. About 1783 Romney was introduced to Emma Hart, afterwards celebrated as Lady Hamilton, and she became the model from whom he worked incessantly. Her bewitching face smiles from numerous canvases; he painted her as a Magdalene and as a Joan of Arc, as a Circe, a Bacchante, a Cassandra; and he has himself confessed that she was the inspirer of what was most beautiful in his art. But her fascinations seem to have been too much for the more than middle-aged painter, and they had their own share in aggravating that nervous restlessness and instability, inherent in his nature, which finally ruined both health and mind.
In 1786 Alderman Boydell started his great scheme of the Shakespeare Gallery, apparently at the suggestion of Romney. The painter at least entered heartily into the plan, and contributed his scene from the Tempest, and his “Infant Shakespeare attended by the Passions,” the latter characterized by the Redgraves as one of the best of his subject pictures. Gradually he began to withdraw from portrait painting, to limit the hours devoted to sitters, and to turn his thoughts to mighty schemes of the ideal subjects which he would execute. Already, in 1792, he had painted “Milton and his Daughters,” which was followed by “Newton making Experiments with the Prism.” He was to paint the Seven Ages, Visions of Adam with the Angel, “six other subjects from Milton—three where Satan is the hero, and three from Adam and Eve,—perhaps six of each.” Having planned and erected a large studio in Hampstead, he removed thither in 1797, with the fine collection of casts from the antique which his friend Flaxman had gathered for him in Italy. But his health was now irremediably shattered, and the man was near his end. In the summer of 1799, suffering from great weakness of body and the profoundest depression of mind, he returned to the north, to Kendal, where his deserted but faithful and long-suffering wife received and tended him. He died on the 15th of November 1802.
The art of Romney, especially his figure subjects, suffered greatly from the waywardness and instability of the painter’s disposition, from his want of fixed purpose and sustained energy. He lacked the steadfast perseverance needful to the accomplishment of a great picture. Addicted as he was throughout his life by an unreasonable timidity and by a self-consciousness which led him at one moment into assertive affectations and at another into exaggerated humility, he avoided the society of his brother artists and lost many opportunities of receiving that frank professional criticism which might have stimulated him to more serious effort. In unwholesome surroundings he steadily deteriorated. His imagination flashed and flickered fitfully upon him, like April sunshine. His fancy would be captivated by a subject, which was presently embodied in a sketch, but the toil of elaborating it into the finished completeness of a painting too frequently overtaxed his powers; he became embarrassed by technical difficulties which, through defective early training, he was unable to surmount, and the half-covered canvas would be turned to the wall. Even in the pictures he finished he was unable to keep to any consistent level of achievement. He produced some fine things, very personal in style and very skilful in handling; but much that he did seems too tentative and too plainly deficient in shrewdness of insight to deserve serious consideration. His colour, too, was often unpleasant, hot and monotonous, and his composition was apt to be stilted and artificial. It is in the best of his portraits that'we feel the painter’s real ability. These, especially his female portraits, are full of grace, charm, distinction, and sweetness. When we examine his heads of Cowper and Wilkes, his delicate and dignified full-length of William Beckford, his “Parson’s Daughter” in the National Gallery, and his group of the Duchess of Gordon and her Son, we cannot deny his claim to rank as one of the notable portrait painters of 18th-century England.
See the Memoirs by William Hayley (1809) and by the artist’s son, the Rev. John Romney (1830); Cunningham’s Lives of the Painters; George Romney and his Art, by Hilda Gamlin (1894). In the fully illustrated George Romney, by Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower (1904), pictures, mainly studies, are reproduced not elsewhere to be found. But the great work upon the artist is Romney, by Humphry Ward and W. Roberts (1904), a monograph of real importance, containing 70 illustrations, a biographical and critical essay, and a catalogue raisonné of the painter’s works. Arthur B. Chamberlain’s Romney (1910) has 73 plates.
ROMNEY, HENRY SIDNEY, Earl of (1641–1704), fourth son of Robert, 2nd earl of Leicester, was born in Paris in 1641. He and his nephew, Robert Spencer, afterwards 2nd earl of Sunderland, his senior by a few months, were sent to travel on the continent of Europe in charge of a Calvinist divine, Dr Thomas Pierce. Sidney’s handsome face helped his advancement at court, but the favour in which he was held by the duchess of York, to Whom he was master of the robes, led to his dismissal in 1666. His disgrace, however, was short-lived. He was promoted captain in 1667, and colonel in 1678. In 1672 he was sent on a mission of congratulation to Louis XIV., and in 1677 became master of the robes to Charles II. He entered parliament as member for Bramber in 1679, and became a close political ally of his nephew Sunderland, with whose wife he carried on an intrigue which caused considerable scandal. Sunderland made this intimacy a means to further his political ends, while Sidney’s social reputation and his apparent frivolity partly concealed his real capacity for intrigue. Sidney was sent by Sunderland and others in 1679 on a special mission to urge William of Orange to visit England, a task that he was able to discharge while acting as the official envoy of Charles II. at the Hague. He was recalled in 1682, but was again sent on a special mission to Holland in the year of the accession of James II. He returned to England in the spring of 1688, and set to work, at William’s desire, to obtain promises of support for the prince of Orange in the event of his landing. He was presently allowed to leave England on giving his word not to visit the
