Then, of course, there is Lady Hamilton, to whom, as we find Allan Cunningham asserting, many have imputed the chief charm of Romney’s best pictures. In these days it is certainly true that her name is inseparably associated with Romney’s art in the popular mind, and the latest addition to the bibliography of Romney is concerned with nothing but Lady Hamilton. Unfortunately for Romney’s reputation both inside and outside his painting-room, this lady’s fame has so filled the public ear with matters which are altogether distinct from the art of painting, that it is almost impossible to appreciate her influence upon Romney’s art in anything like its proper proportions. We are as it were between two fires--the glamour which she threw over the painter and the glamour which he threw over her; and our view of the matter, unless we are careful to screen our eyes, is likely to be too highly coloured for the ordinary purposes of criticism. The broad fact seems to be that for nearly a decade the inspiration of Emma Lyon poured like sunlight into Romney’s studio, and although before it came he had for several years established his reputation and done some of his best work in portraiture, its withdrawal, in 1791, was the end of all that was happy or successful in his career. “His imagination was gone,” says Mr. Humphry Ward; “his health, for many years frail, became less robust than ever, and of his portraits and pictures painted after 1791, many exhibit signs of decaying powers.” That he was exceedingly fond of her need not, of course, be doubted. How could it be otherwise? But is it any more necessary to dwell upon his purely personal relations with her than on those of Sir Joshua Reynolds with Kitty Fisher or Nelly O’Brien? For Reynolds, those two “professional beauties” were sitters, of whom the painter succeeded in painting several beautiful and accomplished portraits. For Romney, Emma Lyon was to some extent the embodiment of the Muse whom I have ventured to postulate as his guardian angel, when engaged in the perilous commerce of painting pretty and fashionable ladies. That she was also the veritable embodiment of all that was pleasing to the mortal eye in the shape of woman is at least equally certain; but unlike so many of her frail sisters, she was a remarkably accomplished and intelligent woman. “She performed both in the serious and comic to admiration,” writes Romney, in a letter describing an evening at Sir William Hamilton’s, “both in singing and acting. Her Nina surpasses everything I ever saw, and I believe as a piece of acting nothing ever surpassed it. The whole company were in an agony of sorrow. Her acting is simple, grand, terrible, and pathetic.”