George Romney

George Romney was the third portrait painter of his London generation, refused to exhibit at the Royal Academy, and painted Emma Hamilton more than sixty times. He was born in Lancashire, the son of a cabinetmaker, and was apprenticed to a travelling portrait painter; he married in 1756 and left his wife and children in the north when he went to London in 1762, seeing her only rarely for nearly forty years. He won a prize from the Society of Arts, spent two years in Italy from 1773 studying Raphael and the antique, and returned to a practice that competed directly with Reynolds and Gainsborough. He never submitted a picture to the Royal Academy, which contemporaries attributed variously to a quarrel with Reynolds and to his own nervousness, and he was never elected to it. He was extremely productive and charged less than Reynolds, and his sitters' books show him painting several hundred people a year at his peak in Cavendish Square. In 1782 he met Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton, then about seventeen, and painted her as Circe, as a bacchante, as Cassandra, as Nature, in a series that made both their reputations. He was friendly with the poet William Hayley and with the Blake circle, and his ambition was for large literary and historical subjects that he mostly left as drawings. His health and mind failed in the 1790s. He returned to Kendal in 1799 to the wife he had left, who nursed him until he died. His son John wrote the first life of him. Several hundred of his portraits survive in British and American collections. The Emma pictures were engraved and sold widely, so her face was known in England before Nelson ever met her.

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