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A few days after her return, Emma burst into Romney's studio dressed in a fantastic Turkish dress and turban. He immediately canceled his other engagements. "At present, and the greatest part of the summer, I shall be engaged in painting pictures from the divine lady. I cannot give her any other epithet, for I think her superior to all womankind," he enthused. Romney painted her throughout sweltering June and July, thirty-eight times in all. Emma's arrival was serendipitous: John Boydell wanted paintings for his paying gallery of Shakespearean scenes in Pall Mall. Romney had already worked from memory and sketches to paint Emma as Miranda in a scene from The Tempest, unveiled to great excitement in the previous year. Now, he took sittings for her to be Cassandra in drapery wielding an axe (which the poet William Hayley later praised as showing her "beauty blazing in prophetic ire") and Joan of Arc, in which she poses similarly to Circe. He also painted her as Ophelia and Titania fromy4 Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as Terpischore, the muse of dance, and half topless as Euphrosyne or Mirth. He had to hurry, for as Emma had told him, "everything is going on for their speedy marriage."

By July, Romney could hardly believe how "all the world [is] following her and talking of her." People crowded into his studio to see paintings of Mrs. Hart. He promoted her effusively, inviting guests to watch her model and hosting parties to showcase her singing and Attitudes. After one performance, he declared the "whole company were in an agony of sorrow." Ever keen to be fashionable, the Prince of Wales commissioned Romney to paint her as Calypso, reclining in a cave and wrapped in pale purple drapes, and also as St. Cecilia, a limpid-eyed nun gazing to the heavens, a wry joke about her life as one of Madam Kelly's "nuns." The prince liked to spend time with her in Romney's studio, but that was as far as the relationship went: he did not invite Emma or Sir William to his brilliant thirtieth-birthday gala on July 29.2

Soon Romney began to detect signs of "neglect." Emma had other claimants on her time. Many painters wanted to enhance their portfolios by taking sittings from her. Thomas Lawrence had heard that she was "the most gratifying thing to a painter's eye that can be." Jibing that Romney's paintings were more revelatory of the "artist's feebleness than her grandeur" and "frightened… she will soon be Lady Hamilton and that I may not have such another opportunity," he pressed Richard Payne Knight to introduce him. After a few short sittings at Knight's Down ton Castle he produced a full portrait,3 La Penserosa, which caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1792.

Emma was the talk of the town. Sir William Lock reported that "All the Statues & Pictures he had seen were in grace so inferior to Her, as scarce to deserve a look."4 A Mrs. Preston was so eager to "hear her softly sing & see her sweetly smile, & exhibit a variety of attitudes & passions" that she put herself "as much as possible in the way to see Mrs Hart but always faild." Many were disappointed in the crush to see the new superstar.

Sir William was excited by the adulation Emma received and deeply relieved that she did not demand to meet his family. When Emma showed no sign of distress after meeting Greville, the last twinge of jealousy disappeared. He visited his friends, and the Society of Dilettanti presented him with twenty-five copies of his work on penile cults, The Worship of Priapus, a sly reference to his life with Emma. Otherwise he parried his family's questions about his marital intentions. Although unhappy about Emma's background, they would have detested the thought of any wife, for they wanted his fortune intact. He promised his sister that he "did not think it Right to marry Mrs Hart; from respect to his King," even though she was the "Happiness of his Life."5 He was playing for time. In May, he had written