Volume 49, Number 6 · April 11, 2002
The Poet's Eye
By James Fenton
George Romney, 1734–1802
Catalog of the exhibition by Alex Kidson
an exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England, February 8–April 21, 2002;the National Portrait Gallery, London, May 30–August 18, 2002; andthe Huntington Library, San Marino, California,September 15–December 1, 2002
Princeton University Press,244 pp., $65.00
Those Delightful Regions of Imagination: Essays on George Romney
edited by Alex Kidson
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale Center for British Art/Yale University Press, 290 pp., $60.00
George Romney once belonged, as Alex Kidson reminds us in an essay, to the foremost ranks of blue-chip artists. What blue-chip connotes in this context is a portrait such as that of Mrs. Penelope Lee Acton, number 136 in the catalog of the current show in Liverpool (but only to be included in its California version): a full-length depiction of a fashionably dressed lady, painted in 1791. Big hair under a big bonnet, an elegant (though the catalog calls it stiff) pose against a mountainous landscape at sunset—yards of fabric, miles of distant view. English art at its most bankable.
Review, 1909 words
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