• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1425 0

presence was everywhere—in the extravagant portraits in the gallery, the half-finished canvases in the studio, and the engravings in the book. Visitors were titillated by the idea of being in the same room as her. People jostled to see her portraits; some even hoped to catch a glimpse of her in the morning. Men asked if they could take her as a mistress. Women demanded to be painted in a similar fashion, hoping that they might appear as gorgeous as she did. The pictures sold quickly. A Mr. Crawford bought Emma Hart in a Straw Hat, and Admiral Vernon paid sixty guineas for Alope Exposed with Her Child. A head of a Bacchante was bought by Sir John Leicester, and Mr. John Christian Curwen, one of Romney's best patrons, snapped up another Bacchante, a version of Serena, as well as Spinstress when Greville was unable to pay the price. To satisfy demand, Romney painted copies of his originals. Charles Greville was surprised and not pleased by his mistress's newfound popularity. He had wanted to sell paintings, but he had never imagined that Emma and her past would become the point of interest.

Romney's sketch of his studio. Greville (standing) and William Hayley look on as Romney consults with Emma, posing for The Spinstress. Romney later declared that his other models “all fall short of The Spinstress, indeed, it is the sun of my hemisphere and they are but twinkling stars.”

As engravings filled print shops, Emma's flowing shifts, which followed the line of the body, and the way she wore her hair loose and without powder encouraged English women to question their stiff brocaded suits and coiffures. At the same time, pictures of the looser dress fashionable in Paris were circulating, and the press began to denounce encumbering hoops, corsets, and rigid petticoats, blaming them for heart attacks, miscarriages, short breath, and hysteria.6 Fashion magazines contained few pictures, and so prints of Romney's portraits of Emma in her figure-hugging drapery became a primary source of fashion ideas for genteel and upper-class women across England.∗ The trend took time to spread. In 1786, a German visitor to London was surprised, after seeing portraits by English painters such as Reynolds and Romney, to find women still attired in rigid dresses and wearing their hair in powder. But as the most stylish women took to wearing shifts, drapery, and simple muslin gowns, and as fashion plates appeared of Marie-Antoinette resplendent in similar outfits and later Empress Josephine (who, it was said, dampened her muslin so it would cling to her curves), the brocaded look fell out of favor. Women welcomed the autonomy of movement allowed by the draped style, delighted to be able to sit down, bend over, and even walk quickly.

Everybody gossiped that Romney and Emma were lovers. They were half right: shy, emotional Romney was infatuated with his model, and she dominated his private thoughts as well as his public gallery. Emma had been schooled in encouraging men to talk about themselves, and he responded to her breathless interest in him. He liked to think that she, who comprehended his creative aims so well, might also understand him as a man. After twenty years living apart from his wife, he was lonely but still too conscious of his humble roots to flirt with the smart women he painted. However, unlike men like Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, he did not believe women existed only for his own pleasure, and he restrained himself, knowing that any attempt to seduce her would wreck her newfound security. He poured out his passion in agitated notes to Hayley Emma, in her turn, felt affectionate toward him and was deeply grateful for his interest in her. But the edgy workaholic painter was not her type, and she was well aware that her relationship with Greville and his willingness to care for her mother and child was conditional on her absolute fidelity. The relationship was an unrequited passion, predicated on her unavailability and his restraint; she was a natural exhibitionist and he was something of a voyeur. She was learning how to keep a man's