England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [51]
At his magnificent studio house in Mayfair, 32 Cavendish Square, fifty-year-old George Romney readied his paints for Mrs. Hart's arrival and tried to calm his nerves. He set out various possible backgrounds and drapes and stoked the fire. For years he had been looking for his muse, for the woman who could embody modern beauty in a classical form. He had met Emma before, but she had been young, raw, and flippant. Charles Greville, his friend and intermittent patron for over ten years, had promised him that she now was hardworking and reliable. Romney hoped so, but he was more concerned that she was still beautiful. Despite his success, he still felt excluded from the artistic establishment, and he needed a model whose looks could transform his art. His career depended on it.
When Emma arrived, she followed Romney's servant through galleries crammed with paintings and then the sitters' waiting room, the books of engravings of possible poses still open on the couch. In back rooms, disgruntled apprentices filled in backgrounds and cleaned paint pots. At the far end of the apartment was Romney's large painting room, lit through the long windows by the pale morning sun. As his servant opened the door, she felt a surge of heat. Artists usually kept their studios warm to dry the paintings and to keep their models warm, but Romney's was stifling, for he was convinced that heat relieved his pain from varicose veins. He kept the windows shut and the fires blazing all day. Some of his sitters complained, but he ignored them all, knowing the heat encouraged women to remove more of their clothes. The fire was burning high for Emma's visit.
The painting room was chaotic, strewn with large mirrors and candles, unsold portraits, canvases whitewashed and ready for use, and piles of brushes and paints. Painted backgrounds of the countryside and sea views were propped along the walls, along with books and sticks for gentlemen to hold while posing, and harps, books, and pieces of needlework for their wives. Romney gently distracted Emma's attention from the pretty instruments and books—they were for the squire's wife who wanted to parade her virtue. He wanted his new visitor to pose as something far more daring.
Wearing her best crimson dress with white gauze around the neckline, Emma sat on a chair raised from the floor, a couple of feet above Romney. As in the Royal Academy, she would use a rope hanging from the ceiling if standing, but all she could do on that Friday morning at eleven o'clock was sit and smile. He could not paint her figure, but Greville had promised him that she would soon be slim once more, thanks to her strict diet at Edgware Row. In his painting studio, shy Romney was transformed into an actor on a stage, flamboyant and overexcited. He painted best when he felt he was performing, and alternated between frenetic energy and languor, rushing up close to gaze at Emma's face and then dashing backward to take in the general effect. He sketched her a little, encouraged her to smile, and tried to have her talk, but the icebreaker was his spoiled studio dog. When she spotted the little spaniel, like so many of his lady sitters, she cuddled it to her and soon broke out into a real, unforced smile.
The sitting was a success. After two hours, with a break for tea or a little light wine and pauses for mixing paints, Emma was allowed to go home for lunch, exhausted but pleased by her day's work. Most people only modeled once or twice for the same painting, but within a week she was back. On March 20, she sat again. The outcome was the gorgeous Sensibility, now on show as Lady Hamilton as Nature in the Frick Collection in New York. Half