England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [54]
She had to work hard to create the look her new friend wanted. He knew little about fashion, and his vague commands to women to wear white satin dresses (which sent one client, Lady Hester Newdigate, into a panic of borrowing and dieting) never created the portrait he had in mind. He reviled powdered mountains of hair, corsets and stays, wide upholstered skirts, and heavy jewelry, and wished women to wear dresses that followed the line of the body. Since the costume worn in the portrait was always the responsibility of the sitter, Emma set her mother to work altering old outfits and buying new material. Once she had regained her figure, Romney discouraged her from stays and pushed her to wear fewer clothes, maintaining the blazing temperatures. She arrived in full dress, every inch the modest eighteenth-century lady, and then transformed herself into a nymph, an audaciously modern version of classical beauty, by loosening her hair and draping satin and muslin so it flowed gracefully around her body.
Emma talked and sang as Romney tried to capture her face, first testing the colors on the top or the sides of the portrait, then swathing them with thick bristle brushes, some of them up to three feet long, before filling in the details with shorter, more delicate sable brushes. Sometimes he simply sketched her or made studies; other times he worked on detailed portraits. Emma experimented with a few poses in front of Hayley—he never forgot "the wonderfully expressive features of my friend Emma, as she used to display them in a variety of characters to me and our beloved Romney"—but modeled for the majority of her pictures alone.3 Although artists encouraged sitters to invite their friends to entertain them (guests also paid the artist if they attended), Greville had forbidden her to see her friends. Without an audience, model and artist quickly came to rely on each other. As Emma came to trust Romney, she began to dance and move in the spirit of the characters, and the great portraits were born.
Romney produced hundreds of canvases of Emma and about sixty finished portraits, as well as cartoons and sketches. His work with Emma was a real artistic experiment and a relief from turning out similar portraits of stolid squires. The portraits of her are a new type of spontaneous and emotional portraiture, expressive, adventurous, and far removed from routine and safe society work.
Emma appeared to best advantage as either a half figure, usually showing her waist, or in full length, and Romney's most beautiful portraits show her in such a pose. Circe, Romney's second finished portrait of Emma, is one of his most impressive. Depicted full length, she is tall and graceful, dressed in a flowing pink and white robe that shows off her ivory skin. Hair cascading lavishly around her shoulders, she steps forth from the darkness, eyes aflame, as compelling as Circe herself, her striking beauty turning men into groveling pigs. Like Sensibility, Circe is one of the few portraits in which Emma gazes directly at the viewer, challenging her audience head-on.
Romney's studio was essentially a shop, and Emma had to ensure that she was not seen by the customers, who would be outraged to encounter any outré women, however much they might admire their portraits. Like all actresses and courtesans, she came between nine and twelve and never later than one-thirty unless it was a Saturday, when the fashionable set was often out of town.4 On weekday afternoons, 32 Cavendish Square was a social whirl, the galleries, according to a friend of Romney's, “filled from Top to Bottom, his Painting and Drawing room crowded with Pictures of People of the First Fashion and Fortune.” Squires and their wives came to search for suitable poses among the engravings