The Scottish Art Review
RENASCENCE.
ART once an outcast in a wintry land, Far from the sun-built house where she was born, Did wander desolate, and laughed to scorn By eyeless men who counted gold like sand : Nor any soul her speech would understand — A friendless stranger in the city lorn. Toil-grimed and blackened with the smoke upborne Of human sacrifice of brain and hand. Then Art, aweary, laid lier down and slept Beneath an ancient gate, and, dreaming, smilcil. For Hope, like Spring, came full of tidings good ; And Labour, huge and free, and Brotherhood Led her between them like a little child — In time new born, to glad new life that leapt.
WaLTEII CllANK.
GEORGE ROMNEY.
T) OMNEY was born at Beckside, near Dalton le JLli Furness, Lancashire, in December 1734. His father seems to have been tolerably well to do, and gave his children good educations. George, however, having shown a turn for mechanics, was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker. He began to draw in a rough-and-ready style, and his productions having attracted some attention, his father bound him, at the age of nineteen, apprentice for four years to a wandering and disrej^utable artist of the name of Steele, who happened then to be liv- ing at Kendal. At twenty-fie llomney married, and set up as a portait painter. Before long he was attracted to London, where success speedily came to him, and he was soon recognised as the most popular portrait painter of the day. His income from his profession was sometimes nearly i'4000 per annum, and he lived in good style, leading his family, whom he had deserted, to console themselves for liis absence with the money he sent to them to keep them from poverty. The prominent passages in Konmey's public life are his two years' stay in Italy for the piu-pose of study (1773-1775), his friendships with the sickly poet Hayley and a coterie of female ' Muses," his connection with the famous ' Shakespeare Gallery' of Boydell, and his long years' devotion to Emma Lyon, one of his models, afterwards the notorious Lady Hamilton, llomney was undoubtedly a weak man, yet he had the knack of keeping about him troops of friends, of whose injudicious Hattery he never seemed to sicken. The one man in London lio held aloof from him and aU his ways was sturdy Sir Joshua Reynolds, who used to speak contemptuously of his rival as ' the man in Cavendish Square.' It must have been owing to this enmity that Romney never exhibited at the Royal Academy, and therefore received no honour from that body. After a most prosperous career he retired from active work in 1798. Broken down completely both in body and mind, he at last remembered the affectionate wife whom he had
