Kate Williams Read online

  The sitting was a success. After two hours, with a break for tea or a little light wine and pauses for mixing paints, Emma was allowed to go home for lunch, exhausted but pleased by her day’s work. Most people only modeled once or twice for the same painting, but within a week she was back. On March 20, she sat again. The outcome was the gorgeous Sensibility, now on show as Lady Hamilton as Nature in the Frick Collection in New York. Half turned to the viewer in her lovely dress, Emma cuddles Romney’s dog so it covers her still rounded waist. Loosely pulled back from her face with a gauze band, her thick chestnut hair streams over her shoulders. The rich crimson of the gown sets off her delicate pink cheeks, creamy neck, and décolletage. Emma’s sparkling smile is infectious.

  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 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 beauty. As William Hayley later wrote to her, “you were not only his Model but his Inspirer,” extravagantly
declaring that Romney admitted “he ow’d a great part of his Felicity as a painter” to the “Intelligence with which you used to animate his diffident & tremulous spirit to the grandest efforts of art.“2

  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 of previous portraits, and valets brought dogs to be sketched quickly and then removed before they ran riot. In the absence of art galleries (the British Museum had a few dusty rooms of archaeological treasures, usually open by appointment), artists’ studios functioned as exhibitions: people went to learn about art, meet friends, and while away an afternoon looking at paintings. Lovers arranged to bump into each other, fallen women contrived to meet their more respectable friends, and rakes prowled for new mistresses.

  All of Romney’s customers probed for details about his beautiful new model. He began to exploit their curiosity by painting her in modern dress and by dropping hints about her past. Emma Hart in Morning Dress, one of her personal favorites, shows her in a stylish black velvet dress with a large pink silk petticoat, a white scarf, and a luscious velvet bow around her neck. Her chestnut curls are topped with a huge-brimmed black hat that flatters her translucent skin and deep dark eyes. In Emma Hart Reading the Newspaper, she wears a similarly fashionable outfit and her eyes are glued to a gripping story. Respectable ladies did not officially read newspapers and certainly not the eye-popping scandal rags. The joke was clear: the tabloid celebrity reads about herself. In Emma Hart in a Straw Hat, she peeps coyly from under her large floppy sun hat. In these portraits, the viewer’s position is slightly above her, her pose is submissive, and unlike in Circe or Sensibility, she looks up at her viewers. Romney also painted her with elegant simplicity as Ariadne, in a turban, in a low-cut gypsy outfit, and as Thetis, slave-girl lover of Achilles.

  The World newspaper praised Romney for his “tender, bewitching touch” in his portraits of Emma and declared them “full of captivation.” Romney’s work expresses his profound feelings for Emma, his fascination with her beauty, and his delight in her unpretentious personality. Unlike the frail women Thomas Gainsborough captured with feathery delicacy, Romney’s sturdily energetic Emma is full of life and eager to laugh, even at herself. Increasingly, the paintings were private jokes on wild Amy Lyon’s endeavors to play the virtuous housewife of Paddington Green. Emma Hart as a Magdalen is the definitive satire on Greville’s assiduous efforts to form her into a penitent prostitute: swathed in Magdalen robes, she kneels in praying position, her covered head upturned for forgiveness. No other painter had Romney’s gift for humor. His rival, Reynolds, knew how to commit gravitas to canvas but struggled to communicate joie de vivre. Ultimately, the president of the Royal Academy preferred the ideal to the real, and Emma was simply too earthy for him: a sexy, down-to-earth girl with a wicked sense of humor.

  The Spinstress is Romney’s most teasing version of her, now on show at Kenwood House, Hampstead. Once more positioned below the viewer’s line of vision, Emma slyly peeps over her shoulder. Her white dress is skintight, enticingly pulled around her bosom. Emma’s beguiling smile hints at the absurdity of her pose, dangling a suggestively shaped spindle while a white hen pecks around her feet. It is all a joke: the costume is much too impractical for work, and she is far too exotic to be a mundane farm girl. The previous artist at number 32, Francis Cotes, had painted ladies with a spinning wheel as the epitome of sedate virtue.5 Romney took the same motif and turned it into a satire on Greville’s attempt to keep his sexy mistress in bucolic retirement. He continued the joke by sketching her modeling for the portrait while Greville, Sir William Hamilton, and William Hayley look on. Just as Marie-Antoinette dressed as a shepherdess, here the kept mistress plays at being a humble domestic drudge. Duchesses, actresses, and courtesans were battling for the role of celebrity muse, but Emma was suddenly more famous than any of them. The image of the girl from nowhere was all over London.

  Romney made Sensibility and Circe the focus of his gallery, and Emma became the star attraction. Her 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 Chri
stian 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.