England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [52]
Aristocratic female sitters typically look away from the viewer, to the side or modestly downward, but Emma's eyes glitter mockingly up at us, locking us in her irresistible gaze. Romney captures a luminous sensuality entirely absent from more grandly remote society portraits. The representation, Sensibility, is borrowed from Emma's favorite poem, The Triumph of Temper by William Hayley about the heroine's “wish to please,” and it is possible that she suggested the subject. In Sensibility, Emma's pose reflects her familiarity with the subject: she radiates youthful sensitivity and innocence. If she was suggesting that she would try to please both Greville and Romney, it was a promise she would keep.
Almost as soon as it was finished, Sensibility became the most popular portrait in Romney's gallery. Many of his visitors wanted to buy it, but Greville preferred to keep it and bought it for £20.1 The painting was soon reproduced as a print and became inordinately popular, displayed in shops across London, sold to hundreds of ordinary people who wanted it on their walls. As Emma's figure returned, she became a regular.
Emma's journeys to Romney's studio in Cavendish Square began a determined entrepreneurial endeavor to disseminate her image across England. Greville's plan to make money by selling portraits of Emma was clever, but he underestimated just how famous it would make her.
Romney was born into a Cumbrian farming family in 1734. Although he came late to portraiture, he was already a successful London painter by the age of thirty-three. In 1773, restless and discontent, he sold his business and traveled to Italy for creative fulfillment. In Rome, he socialized with other artists and their models, met the great artist Henry Fuseli, hired a female model to practice nudes, filled sketchbooks with plans and impressions, and found new inspiration. He imagined a new type of painting, a fusion of classical lines with a contemporary idea of female allure.
On his return to London, Romney had one ambition: to find the model able to bring his ideas to life. He set up a studio at Cavendish Square, previously occupied by the society painter Francis Cotes, and began once more on what he complained was the “cursed drudgery of portrait painting,” thirteen hours a day, every day. Sufficiently spacious to entertain crowds and opulent enough to convince anyone that he was a fashionable painter, his Cavendish Square studio was ideal for a man with big ambitions. He soon became London's second portrait painter, after Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy. By the early 1780s, determined to steal Reynolds's fame and clientele, Romney increased his prices to eighteen or sometimes twenty guineas for a quarter length, approaching Reynolds's price of thirty. He no doubt hired a splendid carriage to rival Reynolds's lavish vehicle, famous across London. The Academy, through its association with the court, controlled the upper echelons of the portrait industry and had excluded Romney in his youth because he had not trained in life drawing. Once he was better established, they invited him to exhibit, but he declined, still smarting from their earlier disdain. William Hayley, who quickly became his most trusted confidant after they met in 1776, encouraged him to remain aloof from the Academy and pushed him to paint more sensual and imaginative canvases.
By the eighteenth century, portraits had replaced tapestry as the most popular wall covering. In a time without photographs, any important event was commemorated with a portrait: election to a club, inheriting an estate, the birth of a child, and acquiring a mistress. Relatives and friends commissioned portraits of each other and gave away copies