George Romney

(Beckside 1734-1802 Kendal)

A three-panelled screen: Classical figures dancing each; 184 x 182.2cm. (72 1/2 x 71 3/4in.) overall

Footnotes

Provenance
Antichità Triboldi, Brescia, 1994, where purchased by the present owner's late mother

That a painted screen decorated with dancing females was part of Romney's estate has long been familiar to students of the artist. Lot 90 in Romney's posthumous sale at Christie's on 27 April 1807 was: Five leaves for a Screen, Dancing Nymphs; bought by 'Long' – probably Romney's friend the surgeon William Long – for 5 guineas.

The screen was presumably returned by Long's heirs to Romney's, since it next appeared in the sale at Christie's in April 1894 of the effects of Miss Elizabeth Romney, the artist's grand-daughter. Here it was titled: A Five-Leaf Screen, painted with 'The Singers go before, the Minstrels follow after, in the midst are the damsels playing with the timbrels,' one panel painted by the artist's son, Rev. John Romney. The buyer was Miss Romney's nephew, Lawrence Romney, who dealt in the works of his great-grandfather in the early years of the 20th century. Beyond the surmise that he removed the panel painted by John Romney, his contribution to the screen's history is uncertain. Unprepossessing photographs of two of the leaves appeared in Ronald Sutherland Gower's monograph on Romney of 1904, and the screen re-surfaced, with four leaves only, in 2018, in the estate of the Romney scholar Patricia Jaffé. It is now at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal.

The present screen is a version of sobering exactitude of three of the leaves of the Kendal screen. The circumstances of its making are unknown; it is not mentioned in any Romney literature, it has not appeared in any known sale, and its provenance goes no further back than to an antique shop in Brescia, Italy, where it was bought by the last owners in 1994. The presence of only three leaves could be thought very promising, as implying that it was produced before a fourth leaf was added to the Kendal screen by Romney himself (as may conceivably have happened). That this was the first screen, and the Abbot Hall one came second, seems perfectly possible.

As has been shown in an article by Olivia Ghosh (Transactions of the Romney Society vol. 24 [2019]), the figures are derived from volume 1 of the famous neo-classical primer Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte, published in 1757. As painted by Romney, the rather immature classical figures betoken a young man's keenness to graft his work on to a new, exciting artistic fashion, and he must have made the first of the screens, whichever it was, shortly after his arrival in London in the spring of 1762.

The inferential evidence offered by the present screen is bewildering. The mounting of the canvases on to card rather than panel, the Italianate framing, and the manuscript note on the reverse stating that the dancers are 'portraits of Lady Hamilton' (correcting 'Lady Romney' – who she?) combine to suggest the possibility of a connection with Lady Hamilton's life in Italy. On this view, if the card backing was to make the canvases light to transport, and they were only framed at their destination, could it be that Romney made the screen as a wedding present – a reminder of the old days in his studio – for Lady Hamilton, which she took to Naples?

The text of the manuscript label mentioned above reads: Screen by George Romney 4-fold belonging to John Orbes [Orde] Romney of Whitestock Hall Ulverston, Cumberland represents Lady Romney [corrected later to Hamilton] in 4 different positions. John Orde Romney (1851- 1924) Lawrence Romney's brother, Elizabeth Romney's nephew, was the titular owner of Whitestock from 1875 until he sold the estate around 1904, and this label, presumably a memorandum about the other version, must date from within that period.

We are grateful to Alex Kidson for kindly writing this catalogue note.