拍品专文
In his Memoirs of George Romney, the artist’s son John Romney wrote that 'it was a regular custom with Mr Romney to make sketches for his principal works; and as most of his sketchbooks have been preserved, every picture that he painted, and many that he intended, may be traced in them almost in chronological order”. Even two hundred years ago, this statement could not have borne strict scrutiny – for many of Romney’s finest paintings no sketches are known at all, and there are several periods of his career for which no sketchbook is known to survive. Even so, the sketchbooks are today recognised as the place where Romney’s true artistic personality – the one largely concealed during his day job of painting society portraits – stands most closely revealed and where the graphic basis of his art is exposed at its rawest and most vibrant; they are the fundamental building blocks upon which an understanding of his career is founded.
Currently around sixty Romney sketchbooks are held in public collections worldwide (for a survey of them see the special edition of the Transactions of the Romney Society, 8, 2003). Few of them are as rich in quality or as revealing in substance as the present one, which appears to have remained un-discussed in the literature on the artist. At 132 pages, it is the second-thickest sketchbook currently known, and unlike virtually all the others, it has had scarcely any leaves removed (those that have been, it may be surmised, were removed by Miss Romney’s executors at the time of her sale in 1894 as being too personal for comfort, rather than the victims of a cherry-picking dealer). The volume is also unusual in at least one of the ways it has been used: it divides, apparently by design, into five sections; three of graphite drawings alternating with two long sections of ink ones. In other sketchbooks it is more common to find either one medium used exclusively, or else a more spontaneous, broken pattern. Although Romney habitually covered numerous leaves of a sketchbook in one session of drawing, it is too much to suppose that each of the five sections of this book correspond with one session or even one campaign of a few days; there is no correlation with the subjects studied. This curiously structured usage, taken with the volume’s unusual number of pages, suggests that Romney may have reserved it for special occasions, and that (as with certain other sketchbooks) it was in use over a period of years rather than weeks or months. This is borne out by the cover, where Romney can be seen to have scraped off the last digit of the date he originally inscribed – 1791 – and substituted another one, a 2 or 3. If 1791 is the date of the earliest drawings in the book, others are probably from two or even three years later.
In other respects the volume’s use is more characteristic: there is a scattergun quality in the succession of subjects, their clustering suggestive of Romney’s habitual darting from one to another and his elision of subjects as he found formal continuities between them. Typically, he did not work systematically from front to back but probably opened the book randomly and worked on the first vacant page he found; he also at different times treated both ends of the book as the front (and inscribed both outer covers). Again characteristically, he held the endpapers and the very first leaves in reserve for notes and memoranda: typical are the lists of clothes to be taken on a journey, although more unusual, indeed unique, is the list of ‘Pictures to be Seen’, yielding an unfamiliar glimpse of a Romney visiting the houses of London patrons rather than the recluse in his studio of writers’ cliché.
The words inscribed on the outer covers, Howard on one, Witchcraft on the other, acted as mnemonics for Romney when he wished to revisit the contents of the book, summarising the predominant subject-matter within. Howard refers to the subject that Romney probably studied more intensively for than any other in the 1790s: John Howard Visiting a Lazaretto, suggested to him by his friend the poet William Hayley (1745-1820) (for whose Ode to Howard published in 1780 Romney had earlier provided a vignette) on the news of the celebrated prison-reformer’s death from typhus in the Crimea at the beginning of 1790. Never painted, the subject defied successful conception, Romney instinctively finding himself attracted more to the writhing prisoners in their dungeon than the heroic figure of Howard himself. There are 26 pages of studies, chiefly of prisoners, in this sketchbook. Witchcraft probably refers to the two scenes from Macbeth, principally the Cavern scene in which the Scottish king revisits the three witches making incantations and prophesies around their cauldron, for which there are fourteen pages of studies, together with eight further pages that are likely to depict specific motifs within the scene. These are balanced by approximately a dozen studies for the Banquet Scene, in which Macbeth freezes at the sight of the ghost of Banquo. Both subjects were under contemplation as paintings for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (again, neither was executed) and Romney may have regarded the rubric Witchcraft as covering both.
Interweaving with these studies are many smaller groups of subjects that still defy precise identification, and one further major group, arguably the most fascinating in the book, for the painting Newton Displaying the Prism (Private Collection) which Romney realised in 1794. The second of a projected quartet of paintings on scenes of English cultural heroes (the others being John Milton (1608-1674), Christopher Wren (1632-1723), and Francis Bacon (1600-1663)), the finished work emerged as a much more prosaic and domesticated conception than that presaged by the twenty pages of dramatic and sublime studies here. These must be early ideas and they are unique, no other drawings surviving in any known sketchbook.
We are grateful to Alex Kidson for preparing this catalogue entry.
Currently around sixty Romney sketchbooks are held in public collections worldwide (for a survey of them see the special edition of the Transactions of the Romney Society, 8, 2003). Few of them are as rich in quality or as revealing in substance as the present one, which appears to have remained un-discussed in the literature on the artist. At 132 pages, it is the second-thickest sketchbook currently known, and unlike virtually all the others, it has had scarcely any leaves removed (those that have been, it may be surmised, were removed by Miss Romney’s executors at the time of her sale in 1894 as being too personal for comfort, rather than the victims of a cherry-picking dealer). The volume is also unusual in at least one of the ways it has been used: it divides, apparently by design, into five sections; three of graphite drawings alternating with two long sections of ink ones. In other sketchbooks it is more common to find either one medium used exclusively, or else a more spontaneous, broken pattern. Although Romney habitually covered numerous leaves of a sketchbook in one session of drawing, it is too much to suppose that each of the five sections of this book correspond with one session or even one campaign of a few days; there is no correlation with the subjects studied. This curiously structured usage, taken with the volume’s unusual number of pages, suggests that Romney may have reserved it for special occasions, and that (as with certain other sketchbooks) it was in use over a period of years rather than weeks or months. This is borne out by the cover, where Romney can be seen to have scraped off the last digit of the date he originally inscribed – 1791 – and substituted another one, a 2 or 3. If 1791 is the date of the earliest drawings in the book, others are probably from two or even three years later.
In other respects the volume’s use is more characteristic: there is a scattergun quality in the succession of subjects, their clustering suggestive of Romney’s habitual darting from one to another and his elision of subjects as he found formal continuities between them. Typically, he did not work systematically from front to back but probably opened the book randomly and worked on the first vacant page he found; he also at different times treated both ends of the book as the front (and inscribed both outer covers). Again characteristically, he held the endpapers and the very first leaves in reserve for notes and memoranda: typical are the lists of clothes to be taken on a journey, although more unusual, indeed unique, is the list of ‘Pictures to be Seen’, yielding an unfamiliar glimpse of a Romney visiting the houses of London patrons rather than the recluse in his studio of writers’ cliché.
The words inscribed on the outer covers, Howard on one, Witchcraft on the other, acted as mnemonics for Romney when he wished to revisit the contents of the book, summarising the predominant subject-matter within. Howard refers to the subject that Romney probably studied more intensively for than any other in the 1790s: John Howard Visiting a Lazaretto, suggested to him by his friend the poet William Hayley (1745-1820) (for whose Ode to Howard published in 1780 Romney had earlier provided a vignette) on the news of the celebrated prison-reformer’s death from typhus in the Crimea at the beginning of 1790. Never painted, the subject defied successful conception, Romney instinctively finding himself attracted more to the writhing prisoners in their dungeon than the heroic figure of Howard himself. There are 26 pages of studies, chiefly of prisoners, in this sketchbook. Witchcraft probably refers to the two scenes from Macbeth, principally the Cavern scene in which the Scottish king revisits the three witches making incantations and prophesies around their cauldron, for which there are fourteen pages of studies, together with eight further pages that are likely to depict specific motifs within the scene. These are balanced by approximately a dozen studies for the Banquet Scene, in which Macbeth freezes at the sight of the ghost of Banquo. Both subjects were under contemplation as paintings for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (again, neither was executed) and Romney may have regarded the rubric Witchcraft as covering both.
Interweaving with these studies are many smaller groups of subjects that still defy precise identification, and one further major group, arguably the most fascinating in the book, for the painting Newton Displaying the Prism (Private Collection) which Romney realised in 1794. The second of a projected quartet of paintings on scenes of English cultural heroes (the others being John Milton (1608-1674), Christopher Wren (1632-1723), and Francis Bacon (1600-1663)), the finished work emerged as a much more prosaic and domesticated conception than that presaged by the twenty pages of dramatic and sublime studies here. These must be early ideas and they are unique, no other drawings surviving in any known sketchbook.
We are grateful to Alex Kidson for preparing this catalogue entry.