The 18th-century English painter George Romney led a life of celebrity and success — just not the one he wanted. A cabinetmaker’s son from Lancashire who hobnobbed with London’s poshest, a premier portraitist who chafed against the genre, a painter-musician who abandoned his palette for the violin whenever he had the chance, he seemed always to be struggling against his own accomplishments. Though he could churn out likenesses on an early industrial-age scale, he also spent years working up preparatory sketches for epic paintings he never began, much less completed.
You would never know that so much conflict swirled in the breast of the young man in the blue silk suit whose presumed self-portrait opens Romney: Brilliant Contrasts in Georgian England, a small but potent exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery. The artist stands outdoors in casual contrapposto. He keeps his jacket fashionably unbuttoned, crosses one white-stockinged leg over the other, and leans his right elbow on a handily placed, moss-softened boulder. At his shoulders, a wooded landscape spills towards a vista of lake, hills, and sky. He is ambitious and comfortable in the world.
But a worm of unease has snuck into the scene. At his feet lie a violin, a cello and a sheaf of music, the tools of an alternate career. A passionate musician and accomplished luthier, Romney often played as he contemplated his canvases-in-progress. His son later noted: “The two arts conspired, and the harmony of the picture was improved by the harmony of the music.”
The Yale show reflects his bifurcated spirit. The oils are portraits, the drawings are intense and turbulent scenes that stayed out of public view all through Romney’s life. And yet the two parts of his catalogue share the liveliness of a quick hand and a restless mind. In a charming 1783 picture of the young Thurlow sisters, he notes their wealth and social status by placing them at the family harpsichord and costuming them in ornate headgear. But what really animates the painting is the girls’ preternatural confidence and the sparkling wit behind their brown-eyed gazes. There’s a reason this canvas erupts with vitality and implicit motion: Romney often squeezed in six sitters a day, a pace that required him to sketch rapidly and execute oils with swift, brushy strokes.
To him, the process was hackwork. “This cursed portrait-painting! How I am shackled with it!” he moaned, sounding like every reporter who dreamt of writing novels and every actor who wanted to direct. “I am determined to live frugally, that I may enable myself to cut it short, as soon as I am tolerably independent, and then give my mind up to those delightful regions of imagination.”
Those regions actually look more troubled than delightful. In his private ink and graphite drawings, he explored an intimate world of emotional extremes. He drew a procession of the damned from Dante’s “Inferno”, a rampant Satan from Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, dark moonlit landscapes, and a floundering boat on a vast and menacing sea.
He made many drawings from Shakespeare and was especially drawn to The Tempest. In one illustration from act one, scene two (“The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch!”), pooling washes of black ink draw our eyes to the heart of the gale, while three loosely articulated figures gesticulate from the shore. These sketches did eventually yield a huge, finished painting, crammed with more than 20 figures — but, as if cursed by Romney’s wayward aspirations, it disintegrated over the decades and now exists only as fragments.
Born in 1734 in Dalton-in-Furness, a week’s journey from London at the time, he had almost no teachers but himself. When three dozen of his colleagues founded the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, he declined to join them, even though his portraits lie squarely in the establishment style. He grew rich and respected, perhaps to his chagrin, and when he died in 1802, he stood, along with two of the academy’s founders, Reynolds and Gainsborough, as one of England’s pre-eminent portraitists.
He seemed well placed for posthumous success, too. Instead, his reputation plummeted. Later generations of gatekeepers dismissed him as a paintbrush paparazzo, addicted to the superficial. It probably didn’t help that his work had a spurt of popularity among Anglophile Americans of the gilded age, who combed through English collections for the trappings of aristocracy. That flicker of interest quickly dwindled.
If the Yale show prompts another, more durable revival, it may be because of his prison drawings, which put him in the gloomy company of Blake, Fuseli and Piranesi. Late in life, Romney got caught up in political causes. A 1790 trip to France prompted a flirtation with revolution, though his enthusiasm waned a little with every thud of the guillotine, and eventually petered out altogether. Around that time, he began depicting the prison reformer John Howard on his fact-finding missions to Britain’s network of dungeons. The scenes he drew were partly second-hand reportage, partly exercises of the imagination he had always wanted to unleash, the whole concoction refined by art-historical precedent.
Piranesi’s fantastical arrangements of planes and perforations, darkness and crisp detail, provide the set for Romney’s dramas of suffering. The tangles of wracked and twisted bodies, especially the woman throwing her arms and head back in anguish, come straight out of Fuseli. The orgies of pain are close to Blake’s plague scenes of 1779, and Blake acknowledged the homage by referring to him as “our admired Sublime Romney”.
It’s possible that even if Romney never witnessed any nightmares of incarceration, he did experience them internally, since he was held captive by an unsettled mind. His friend Richard Cumberland described him as “shy, private, studious and contemplative; conscious of all the disadvantages and privations of a very stinted education; of a habit naturally hypochondriac, with aspen nerves, that every breath could ruffle.” He grappled with paranoia and depression, and increasingly withdrew from the world.
We get a hint of this saturnine Romney in an incomplete self-portrait from 1784, which is sadly absent from Yale (but is permanently on view at London’s National Portrait Gallery). He sits with one chilly shoulder turned towards the viewer, arms folded across an unfinished chest. The face is done, though, and it’s not a friendly one: his tousled (possibly unwashed) locks, suspicious glare and thuggish pout suggest that after a lifetime of flattering his clients’ pampered egos, he is no longer in the mood to please. It’s a painting that announces: “Whatever it is you want, I’m disinclined to provide it.” That gangster attitude just might get him another shot at glory.
To October 19, artgallery.yale.edu