Collection: Art prints by George Romney

George Romney was an English painter and is considered one of the most important portraitists of the late 18th century. He grew up in the county of Lancashire and showed a pronounced talent for drawing and painting at an early age. Without any formal academic training, he initially learned his craft from the provincial painter Christopher Steele before deciding to go his own way. Against the odds of his personal circumstances - he had married early and had a family to support - he left his wife and children in the north of England and went to London in 1762 to seek artistic fame.

In London, Romney achieved an impressive social and artistic rise. He quickly established himself as a sought-after portrait painter of high society and soon became a serious rival to Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, the dominant figures in English portraiture at the time. His studio in Cavendish Square became a meeting place for London's aristocratic and intellectual elite. However, Romney was always looking for more than a mere likeness of his patrons. He wanted to visualize the character, vitality and inner world of his models, striving for an elegance and lightness that set his pictures apart from the stiff representational painting of many of his contemporaries.

Romney found decisive inspiration in his travels to Italy, especially Rome, where he studied antiquity and Renaissance painting. This encounter with the classical tradition left a lasting mark on his work. Throughout his life, he dreamed of great history painting, of mythological and literary scenes, which he considered to be the true pinnacle of the art of painting. He considered the commercial portrait business, to which he owed his livelihood, to be largely restrictive - and yet it was precisely in this genre that he created his most convincing works.

The most significant and momentous encounter of his life was with Emma Hart, the future Lady Hamilton, whom he portrayed countless times from 1782 onwards. In her, Romney found a model who fired his artistic imagination like no other. He painted her as mythological figures, as a Bacchante, as Circe, as a mourning penitent - again and again and in ever new roles. This series of portraits is one of the most fascinating groups of works in English painting and demonstrates Romney's ability to turn a human face into a medium for much larger themes.

In the last years of his life, Romney's creative energy waned. Suffering from increasing melancholy and physical decline, he withdrew from London and eventually returned to his long-neglected wife in the north of England, who despite everything cared for him until his death in 1802. His work left a complex legacy: while his portraits had a direct influence on English portrait painting, his great ambitions as a history painter remained largely unfulfilled. Today, Romney's paintings are preserved in important collections worldwide and are considered impressive testimonies to an era in which portraiture reached its artistic peak in England.