George Romney
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This newly discovered portrait is a major addition to George Romney’s oeuvre, and represents the first attempt at one of his best known portraits of his celebrated muse, Emma Hamilton. It is a preliminary study for the (slightly smaller) portrait of Emma now in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, which has variously been titled ‘Emma Hamilton as Ariadne’, or ‘Emma Hamilton as Absence’. Lost for many years, recent conservation by Philip Mould & Co. has removed several layers of obscuring over-paint and old varnish to reveal a spirited work by an artist at the height of his powers.
Romney’s fascination with Emma produced one of the great artist-model relationships in British art. They first met in 1782 – she (then Emma Hart) was sixteen, he forty-seven. Her then lover, George Greville (1749-1809), had brought her to the artist's studio. As Romney's model for the next four years, Emma found an outlet for her theatrical abilities which resulted in one of the most famous and fruitful partnerships in English portraiture. The artist seized upon Emma's natural beauty and talent for role-play and painted her obsessively in various allegorical and classical guises.
As became a woman whose whole life seemed to revolve around responding to the needs and sensitivities of men, Emma was in turn adept at handling her artistic admirer. The results can be seen throughout Romney’s pictures of the 1780s, a decade that formed the high-point of his career. The concentrated study of the most sensual woman of the age raised Romney’s artistic energy to new levels, and inspired him to produce his best work. Emma, it should be remembered, was well rewarded too. Romney’s pictures helped launch the concept of Emma as celebrity. They were often engraved and reproduced within weeks of completion. And it is through Romney that Emma has been transmitted to posterity as an un-aging, timeless beauty; posterity sees Emma through Romney’s eyes, just as it hears her through Nelson’s letters.
Provenance
According to Christie’s catalogue (1879), ‘Painted for the family of W. Hudson of Scarborough’; By descent to G. Hudson; By whom consigned to Christie’s, 31st May 1879, lot 232A, ‘Romney, Lady Hamilton’, described in ‘The Times’ as ‘Lady Hamilton as Ariadne, nearly life size, in white dress and straw hat, in a cave by the sea’; Bought in at £231, and delivered to Graves & Co.; Re-consigned, by G. Hudson under Graves’ aegis, at Christie’s 29th May 1880, lot 120F, ‘George Romney, Lady Hamilton, as Ariadne, half-length’; Caroline, Duchess of Montrose; By whom sold, Christie’s 14th July 1894, lot39; Bought in at 450 guineas; Christie’s 4th May 1895, lot 87, bt. Lawrie for 195 guineas; Sir William Cunliffe Brooks, 1st Bt. (d.1900); Alfred H. Mulliken; American Art Association, New York, 5th January 1933, lot 48; Lydia Reeves, New York; Sotheby’s, New York, 17th April 1986, lot 119, as ‘attributed to Romney’; US Private Collection
Literature
‘The Times’, Tuesday 3rd June, 1879, p.6; ‘The Academy’, 1879, Vol. 15, p.507; Humphrey Ward and William Roberts, ‘George Romney, A Catalogue Raisonné of his Works’ (London & New York 1904), Vol. II, No. 2b, p.180; Alex Kidson, ‘George Romney 1734-1802’ (exhibition catalogue, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2001), p.200.