Romney

George Romney spent his life painting the faces of the English elite, yet died in near-obscurity, forgotten by the very society that had paid him handsomely. Randall Davies' 1914 biography mounts an impassioned corrective: a scholarly case for why this namesake of a later political dynasty deserves placement alongside Reynolds and Gainsborough rather than beneath them. Davies examines the artist's restless ambition, his dissatisfaction with the commercial treadmill of portrait commissions, and his obsessive devotion to Lady Hamilton, the woman who became his muse and his unfinished masterpiece. The book probes the peculiar pain of being a talented portraitist in an era that celebrated portraiture but reserved its highest praise for a select few. Through close analysis of Romney's techniques and the historical context of his work, Davies argues that posterity has been unfair to a man whose whole-length portraits, once seen, demand reevaluation. This is art history as advocacy, written when the rediscovery of overlooked British painters was coming into fashion.