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By Root 1407 0

of their portraits as presents. After a painting was completed, Romney sent it to a printmaker, who engraved an imitation on a copper plate and then made hundreds, perhaps thousands of black-and-white impressions for those who could not afford the real thing. Artists competed fiercely to satisfy public demand. James Northcote, assistant to Reynolds, estimated that there were about eight hundred painters in London, but he concluded that there was only work for eight, of all types, including history and landscape. A portrait painter needed smooth social skills: he had to be a gentleman and a host, a self-promoter and an entertainer, all the while alert to the subtlest differences in the social status of his clientele. Romney had perfected his act, and the crowds flocked to his studio.

Despite his success, Romney was still searching for the model who could bring to life the ideas he had in Italy. Ordinary tavern girls did not have the sophistication, and famous actresses and beauties such as Harriet Mellon and Kitty Bannister, although electrifying onstage, could be stiff in portraiture and, moreover, determined to appear more virtuous in their portraits than they did onstage. And no respectable woman would model as a goddess—they wished to be painted only as themselves. Romney wanted a model to try to imitate the spirit of his classical models. He also wanted her to pose in a way that implied she was dancing or running, but squires' wives and actresses would only sit, or at their most daring lean on a post. Melancholic Romney could not rival Reynolds's suave social poise or his cozy relationship with high society. He needed to present himself quite differently.

At the same time that Romney was dreaming of showing modern beauty in classical form, the British public was newly greedy for pictures of glamorous young women and ideas for styles in dress. France had glittery Marie-Antoinette and her court of fashion-plate female courtiers, but in England, the Hanoverian queen and princesses were plain and stolid, and most aristocratic women simply dull. A new breed of female celebrity evolved. Actresses, courtesans, and models fed the public hunger for glamour and ideas of stylish dress. Paintings of them were the top attractions at exhibitions and artists' studios, their prints were plastered across shop windows, and the newspapers discussed their love lives in salacious detail, with the stories often planted by the women themselves. The name of a virtuous lady would be read only twice, in the announcement of her marriage and in her obituary, and so those women who were willing to pass up their chances of respectability had a free run to exploit the hunger of London's sixty or so daily newspapers for scandal, style, and high glamour. Any girl hungry for fame needed to be painted often—and Emma was determined. She sat for Romney twice in June, nine times in July, four times in August, and four more in December. The daybooks show 118 sittings between 1782 and 1784, and, since the record for 1785 is lost, she probably posed for him more than 200 times in total.

Thanks to her early training in dance and posture, Emma excelled in Romney's studio. As a fellow artist declared, she had honed her skills modeling as Graham's Goddess of Health, so when she met Romney, he hardly needed to instruct her: “he asked her to adopt a thousand graceful attitudes, which he then painted.” With him, she “developed a new talent which was later to make her famous.” Emma had an unparalleled ability to move and express moods, as well as a flair for dress, which allowed her to drape and arrange her clothes to transform her look. Her acute awareness of the effect of her own image gave her an instinctive understanding of Romney's ambitions. She used her skills as a model to reinvent herself as other characters, turning her raw beauty into the embodiment of sensuality and grace. Delighted by her versatility, Romney challenged her to move between roles, from the seductress Circe to a playful young girl or a tragic heroine, retaining all the while her essential