Mrs. Johnstone and her Son

George Romney painted fast, charged less than Reynolds, and built one of the busiest portrait practices in eighteenth century London without ever exhibiting at the Royal Academy. He avoided it deliberately, which cost him the establishment status his sitter list suggests he deserved. He left his wife in the north and did not live with her again for nearly forty years, returning only when his health failed. In London he worked constantly and kept sitter books that record the traffic through his studio. Emma Hamilton changed the later work. He painted her more than sixty times, as Circe, as a bacchante, as herself, and the pictures are looser and more charged than the standard commissions. The society portraits pay the rent. The Emma pictures are where his reputation now sits.