A Brush With Fame

George Romney was a portrait machine. Two hundred years before Andy Warhol dubbed his New York studio the Factory, Romney was manufacturing painted likenesses of grandees and their families in London’s newly fashionable Cavendish Square. Between 1776 and 1795, his meticulous record books show, the artist was seeing three, five, even seven sitters per workday--plus one or two on Sunday.

And Romney didn’t just paint the all-important faces of Elizabeth, Countess of Derby, or Edward Wortley Montagu or the Clavering children, Thomas and Catherine. Romney did the whole thing himself. He hardly ever employed assistants to paint their satin dresses, brocade vests and lacy collars, or to fill in the backgrounds of wooded landscapes of the English countryside over which so many of them reigned. And given the staggering volume of his production, he did it remarkably well--as a large and satisfying exhibition that opened Sunday at the Huntington Library eloquently demonstrates.

The show, which arrives from London’s National Portrait Gallery for its only American presentation, is a fascinating survey of a pivotal phenomenon in the history of European art. Romney’s career coincides with the first dynamic rush of the Industrial Revolution. It records not just the beneficiaries of explosive new wealth and power, but also the mind-set that fueled its engines. A Romney portrait is the embodiment of a luxury consumer product; as such, it also represents a dramatic shift in the artist’s social role.

Take the 1770 double-portrait of an unidentified woman and her son, which stands at the apex of Romney’s early career. Dressed in a gown of lustrous, silvery white satin trimmed in thick layers of delicate lace, the lady is perched at the edge of a graceful chair upholstered in red and cerulean brocade. Her arms embrace her young son, elegantly dressed and seated on her lap, while behind them billowing clouds over a low horizon drift off into a dramatic infinity of glowing light.

The landscape vista heightens the sense of monumental stability established by the central composition, which takes the shape of an eternal pyramid. Their exalted position in the world is assured--and thus has it always been.

The woman and her son form a secular Madonna and Child. Their alabaster skin, untouched by the sun that tans the laboring classes, is wrapped in luxurious fabrics suggestive of the high end of the textile industry that was driving England’s manufacturing juggernaut. Romney has a bit of trouble fitting the boy’s large head comfortably onto his narrow shoulders, while the lap on which the lad rests is so long that it might qualify Mummy for the NBA. Yet, the demeanor Romney has given to his sitters is astounding--she, back ramrod straight and head cocked, imperious and self-satisfied; he, languid and bored, his limbs draped like a porcelain doll’s.

Romney’s picture is a stunning portrait of sumptuousness and presumptuousness. His flawless representation of those dual characteristics soon had patrons lining up at his door. Romney didn’t invent British portraiture in the Grand Manner, but he certainly recognized that he could market it to become the reigning fashion in the last quarter of the 18th century.

At the Huntington’s Boone Gallery, Romney’s career unfolds in 54 paintings and 38 drawings, plus half a dozen sketchbooks. The first rooms show his provincial beginnings. Romney was born in England’s northwest Lake District in 1734, and he apprenticed with a local portraitist who had in turn been trained by French artist Carle van Loo, court painter to Louis XV. His precocious talents at painting modestly scaled pictures of prosperous local gentry at home--paintings called “conversation pieces”--brought him regional fame. As an artist, he quickly became a big fish in a little pond.

But Romney’s ambitions were much larger than that. At 28 he headed south to London, virtually abandoning his much older wife and young son but determined to make it as a history painter. Now the littlest fish in the biggest pond of all, he had a rough go of it.

Not much remains of his first five years in London, when he had to return periodically to the northwest to scrape together money doing commissions. His breakthrough came in 1768, when a London lawyer and amateur artist commissioned him to paint his family’s portrait. “The Leigh Family” is an odd work, but the big, nearly 7-by-8-foot canvas represents quite a leap from Romney’s earlier paintings.

The unusual composition is split in two. Mr. and Mrs. Leigh and their eldest son are over to one side, forming their own nominal “holy family,” while their four daughters--the eldest holding their baby boy aloft--are grouped on the other. Standing on a classical porch, they’re dressed to the nines.

Romney has stitched together modest attributes of a conversation piece with showy, intellectualized elements of Grand Manner style, espoused by the Royal Academy’s lordly president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. The proliferating Leigh family wasn’t exactly of the proper social station for such aristocratic treatment--but there they are in all their satin finery just the same. The lawyer and his family are arrayed across the canvas in the shallow space of low relief, like gods and heroines on some classical marble frieze dug up in Greece.

The picture was a hit. Clients came calling. Romney was on his way.

But he was not on his way to becoming a history painter, which is why he had come to London in the first place. The exhibition shows an artist of ambition and skill, but one whose conflicted sense of his own direction often got the better of him. Market pressures regularly intervened.

For example, Romney spent two years in Italy (1773-1775), where he studied the requisite classical sources and Renaissance masters. It heightened his skills a lot. However, it wasn’t simply a desire to sharpen his edge as a potential painter of high-minded literary and historical subjects that propelled him there. London patrons knew of the importance of the Grand Tour to the proper education of a painter; if Romney hadn’t gone, he would have lost clients.

Romney was competitive, and he developed a savvy business plan. His chief rivals were two older artists, Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, both with an established aristocratic clientele. So, when he shrewdly moved into the up-and-coming neighborhood of Cavendish Square, leaving them behind in more conventional, old-money parts of town, Romney also undercut their commission prices--sometimes by more than 50%. What he lost per picture he would make up for in quantity.

Think Michael Graves at Target: high style for less money, sold in volume. Britain’s Industrial Revolution might have started with the manufacture of practical goods, but it quickly enveloped art.

Given the production demands, it’s remarkable Romney could be so good. The Huntington has one of the largest Romney collections anywhere, and several of its own pictures are among the show’s standouts.

Take the late, full-length figure of “Mrs. Penelope Lee Acton” (1791), which is a marvel of design. Her right side is a nearly straight vertical line, from the hem of her white dress to her shoulder, which leads your eye along an ever-changing array of jewel-like colors in the landscape. By contrast, her left side, set against the uniformly dark woods, is like a lightning bolt of jagged contours.

Romney was certainly conflicted about his failure to leave portraiture behind and emerge as a confident history painter. Lots of commissions were never finished. He went on tangents--as in his panting ardor for Emma, Lady Hamilton, whom he revered as his muse. His attempts at painting scenes from Milton and Shakespeare were often muddled and confusing.

In the show, the one place he shines as a literary artist is in his drawings. Their fluid emphasis on subjective sensibility and imagination anticipates the Romantic era, which flourished after his death in 1802.

They can also harbor an amazing arrogance. A big, impressive 1777 cartoon in black chalk, drawn on six sheets of paper joined together, shows personifications of Joy and Sorrow (or comedy and tragedy) attendant at the birth of Shakespeare. The baby lies at the bottom of the picture in a basket, like Moses in the bulrushes or Jesus in the manger. Behind him a Mary-like figure represents Nature, pulling back a veil to reveal herself.

The personifications are drawn like Greek maidens, while the composition recalls a Roman relief. Natural law, which originated in the thought of Greek and Roman Stoics, is dramatically asserted, with nature as the source of an artist’s genius. Rarely has the immutable authority of British art been so baldly claimed.

“George Romney: 1734-1802,” Boone Gallery, Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, (626) 405-2140, through Dec. 1. Closed Monday.