Читать книгу Patriotic Lady - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 15

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By midsummer Mr. Greville had given his Emma, rescued from the scrap-heap, at least a superficial polish, and he wished to have his good taste and his labour applauded; he was in every thing a man of his world and he followed the fashionable course of taking his mistress to the studio of a popular painter in order that her charms might be immortalized in some modish guise.

So Emma, one blowing blue day, tripped along gaily to No. 32, Cavendish Square, where the formidable-looking mansions surrounded the plot of grass and gravel where coaches and link men waited and loungers gossiped by the pavement posts; Mr. Greville accompanied her and preceded her up the wide stair to the studio that had for long been the scene of the successful career of Francis Cotes, the charming portraitist and had for eight years been the workshop of George Romney.

Emma was carefully dressed, according to Mr. Greville's direction, in a long plain gown of white cambric, fastened under the bosom with a wide blue ribbon, with a low bodice and short sleeves; the line of the shoulders and bust was broken only by a light scarf, the girl's hair hung in ringlets round her neck and a wide Leghorn straw-hat, with a low crown shaded her face.

The painter was instantly and for ever enthralled by what nature and Charles Greville had made of Amy Lyon, who, under the pretty name of Emma Hart stood meekly in the large studio at Cavendish Square.

George Romney was a melancholy man gnawed by the bitter dissatisfaction of the artist who had given up everything for art and did not find it sufficient to fill his life. When Emma was brought into his presence by her complacent protector, the painter was forty-eight years of age, dark, stooping, with blunt features, and a manner shy to uncouthness.

His birth was little higher than that of the blacksmith's daughter; both were close to the English peasantry; they came, on the male side, from the same part of the country; George Romney's father had been a small statesman of Walton-in-Furness, Lancashire, who worked at cabinet-making and knew something of architecture; the painter's childhood had been passed in the North, his youth in severe study of his chosen art. He felt keenly that his lack of education, his limited social opportunities had handicapped him as both man and artist; he had married early in life a faithful woman who had borne him two children, and whom he had left behind in the North when he started out to seek his fortune in the city; that had been twenty years ago and it was fifteen years since he had revisited Mary Romney, who remained silent, with an odd patience, in the Cumberland farm that seemed so far from London.

George Romney had been successful; even when working in competition with the fashionable, genial and magnificent Sir Joshua Reynolds, he had earned enough by his portraits to enable him to travel in Italy, where he had studied his art with exhausting concentration.

The patronage of the Duke of Richmond and of Charles Greville's brother, the Earl of Warwick, had enabled him, on his return to London, to set up in the studio of Francis Cotes, and to become, with great rapidity, one of the most sought-after portraitists of the day. His life remained gloomy; apart from a few friends such as William Hayley, who flattered, pestered and bored him, and Richard Cumberland, who admired and encouraged him, he had no intimates, and he avoided acquaintances, diversions and distractions with a nervous dislike of his fellow-men and a gloomy mistrust of himself that were fast developing into hypochondria. He had toiled for years at the development of his art with a passionate, impatient industry that had brought about the achievement of a perfect, if limited technique.

Enraptured by the genius of Raphael and Titian, he remained for ever dissatisfied with his own efforts, and the studio, where Emma entered like a goddess, was littered by portfolios bulging with unfinished sketches, jottings for pictures never begun, while the walls were encumbered with incomplete canvases; some laid aside because a sitter had failed or a model not been procurable, some abandoned in mere impatience while the painter made another effort with equally short-lived enthusiasm.

He made more than a handsome income by his portraits, but the money brought him little pleasure; he was open-handed and had generously supported a talented wastrel of a brother until death had relieved him of that burden, and it concerned him little whether his portraits were paid for promptly or indeed paid for at all; and his prices never rose to more than half the fees demanded by Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy, from which George Romney stood nervously aloof.

When Charles Greville took Emma to the studio in Cavendish Square, he brought much happiness to the painter and conferred a very great benefit on posterity. The Grevilles had always admired and patronized Romney who, in his Italian travels, had carried about with him a letter of introduction to Sir William Hamilton, the British Minister at Naples, written by Charles Greville but never presented by the painter, who did not go so far south; the frigid dilettante had a genuine liking for the uncouth artist with his gipsy blood, his gloomy face and his incomparable talent for depicting the robust beauty of English women and children.

Greville, who always closely supervised Emma's wardrobe, had taught her to dress in the style in which Romney painted his sitters, so that everything about his patron's mistress enchanted the artist—the girl herself and the taste with which she was set off.

George Romney fell in love with Emma, with all that Emma symbolized; he had painted many fair and charming women, but so strong was his sense of an ideal beauty that he had, perhaps, unconsciously, made these sitters look much the same when he put them on canvas.

In the case of Emma there was no need of this infidelity to nature that was fidelity to an inner vision, the girl was what all painters long to find, the ideal woman in human flesh and blood.

When Emma stepped on the model's block and under the careful directions of Charles Greville assumed her classic poses, Romney knew that he had met the creature necessary for the fullest expression of his art; she excited him as had Titian's canvases which he had seen in Venice, the Raphael masterpiece he had copied in Rome; she was at once a stimulus, an inspiration, a seal of his achievement—she would take his art as far as it could go. And Emma, reading the plain, sad man's honest rapturous delight in her charms as she posed in the becoming studio light, found herself exalted, lifted out of herself, never more to be a pretty girl, a naughty girl, a girl in distress, but for ever—a beauty.