ROMNEY, George

Edward Wortley Montagu (1713-1776) was an English author and traveller. He was characterised by his contemporaries as playboy, dilettante, author, revolutionary, and traveler - a dysfunctional child. Romney’s portrait was painted during his sojourn in Venice. It shows the influence of Titian. Presenting a vigorous and positively war-like figure, the pose is derived from Titian’s similarly exotic Portrait of Ippolito de’ Medici in Hungarian costume.

This portrait was part of the collection of portraits formed by the 2nd Earl of Warwick, at Warwick Castle in the late eighteenth century. For many years, it has been on loan in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, since the late 1970s.

The sitter of this portrait was George, Lord Brooke (1772-1786), son of George Greville, 2nd Earl of Warwick. He died in 1786, aged just fourteen. His father was a great collector and antiquarian, George Romney’s first and most important noble patron.

The painting represents a three-quarter-length portrait of Lady Anne Barbara Russell (1764-1814), sitting in a green dress with white collar, and her eldest son Henry (1783-1852) standing on a table looking at his reflection in a looking-glass.

Emma Lyon (1765-1815) was the daughter of Henry Lyon, a blacksmith. (She later changed her name to Emma Hart.) She became Lady Hamilton when in 1791 married Sir William Hamilton who was in his fifties. She is best remembered as the mistress of Lord Nelson and as the muse of George Romney. Emma captured Romney’s imagination to such an extent that he later described her as ‘the divine lady … superior to all womankind’ (Letter, 19 June 1791). In the four years between April 1782 and March 1786 alone, Emma sat to Romney well over 100 times. The outcome of their relationship was a sequence of fancy portraits and literary subjects with dramatic heroines – over sixty paintings which take Emma as their inspiration or defining feature.

George Romney received little formal artistic training, and was largely self-taught. Together with Francis Cotes and, later, Thomas Gainsborough, he was considered the chief rival to Sir Joshua Reynolds as portraitist to the fashionable set in London. Paintings from his mature period, such as the present work, are characterized by a high, fresh colouring and fluent brushwork, the result of a period of study in Italy, where he was impressed by Titian’s virtuoso style.

This portrait depicts Lady Georgiana Smyth (c. 1757-1799) and her son, John Henry (1780-1822). It was likely commissioned to celebrate the third birthday of John Henry who was born on 20 March, 1780.

This portrait is said to have been the first picture that Romney completed after his return from Italy. In Italy Romney was seduced by Italy’s classical heritage, in particular the work of Raphael.

The sitter of this portrait, Mrs. Anne Carwardine (1752-1817) was the wife of Thomas Carwardine, a close friend of Romney. She is shown half-length, seated, wearing a black dress and a white lace shawl with a white bonnet, holding her eldest son Thomas (1772-1822) in her arms. The portrait acknowledges a debt to Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia.

This painting is a rare and excellent example of Romney’s mastery of the genre of the family portrait.

In the portraits of the late 1700s, when English Neoclassicism and its cult of naturalness flourished, a landscape usually appears behind the sitter. The neutral background of this portrait, created by an artist well-known in his time, does not make it extraordinary: the sketch-like painting manner (unusual for European art of the period), a colour scheme based on subtle transitions of grey-brown tones, and the subject’s attire suggest that she is posing outdoors, exposed to a damp London wind.

Henry Ainslie, a physician, married Agnes Ford in 1785. The Ainslie’s were favoured clients and good friends of the artist. The present canvas is the second version of the portrait commissioned by the family in 1787. No documentation of a commission for this second version is recorded.

The sitter was an English politician and writer (1720-1790).

This painting portrays a gentleman, half-length, wearing a dark coat and white stock. English portraiture flourished in the late eighteenth century, when not only aristocrats, but also lesser nobles, merchants and officers commissioned portraits of themselves, their wives and children. The present portrait reflects this trend, and commissions similar to it are typical of much of Romney’s work.

Romney was born in Lancashire and trained as a cabinet-maker before turning to painting; after visits to Paris and Rome he established himself as a fashionable portraitist in London, rivalling Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. He developed a distinctive style of draughtsmanship, often employing swathes of dark ink to establish the main features and key accents of light in his paintings. This impressive drawing is related to a portrait of Elizabeth Warren (National Museums and Galleries, Cardiff), commissioned by her father, which shows her at about the age of sixteen, just before her marriage to Viscount Bulkeley. It was the first major portrait Romney worked on after his return from Italy, and he made a number of preparatory studies for it, carefully refining his ideas. Hebe, an ideal personification of youth, was the cup-bearer of the gods, and in the final work Romney depicts his sitter before a cascade, with a vase before her, and an eagle, representing Jupiter, ominously hovering above.