In three beautifully produced volumes, Alex Kidson has provided catalogue entries for George Romney’s very considerable oeuvre of 1,719 portraits produced between 1760 and the 1790s and more than 100 subject paintings and copies. Romney’s compositions were often bold and original, his handling of paint broad and confident and his images ranging from tender and sympathetic to masculine and powerful. Perhaps because he spurned London exhibitions, and his clientele were generally less glamorous, he is usually placed as the runner-up behind his contemporaries Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. To the modern eye, however, he might be considered more original than either rival as he was less hidebound by the strictures of prototypes that Reynolds was so happy to follow, and his compositions were more striking than Gainsborough’s limited repertoire. The book finally provides comprehensive evidence from which future writers can make these assessments.
Romney (1734-1802) left an extensive legacy of archive material recorded in sitters’ books, account books, framing accounts and other jottings that Kidson describes in the preface to his book. Each record has been skilfully linked to existing paintings and used as a basis for the entries of both identified and lost portraits. Kidson has not fallen into the trap of seeking out images to fit descriptions as he has linked his detailed archival research with a tenacious desire to see as many examples of the artist’s work as possible, which he clearly notes in the text with an asterisk.
George Romney is a thorough catalogue that has the great advantage of being written from the considered perspective of an overview and sets high standards for future work. Kidson is keen to repeat David Mannings’s credo set out in the introduction to his magisterial Sir Joshua Reynolds: a Complete Catalogue of his Paintings (2000): that it is best to consider the book as a progress report, that more research is needed and that catalogues do not provide the last word.
By their nature, catalogues raisonnés satisfy few. Their readers often have one particular painting in their sights and are often disappointed by the lack of detail on that entry. This myopic approach fails to consider the balance and the breadth of the task. Each of the entries subscribes to a rubric, and for the author there is a desire to give each painting equality and consistency among the other entries, so the ground rules for individual paintings are established early on in the planning.
Catalogues of portraits can often be mired in too much biographical information, and time constraints can make elusive details of provenance impossible to find. The prime task of any catalogue is to establish the oeuvre of an artist through reproduction and then back it up with archival evidence or stylistic comparison. If there is a fault with the book, it is perhaps that the difference between copies and versions is less distinct than one might wish, but this is a shortcoming that Kidson identifies in his introduction.
Veering away from the example of the Reynolds catalogue and following the technical advances in book production, Yale University Press has integrated the illustrations, many of them newly photographed in colour, with the text. Using the book is much easier, but it does detract from the reader’s understanding of the artist’s development and for that we must return to Kidson’s catalogue of the Romney exhibition in 2002 that whetted the appetite for this splendid monograph.
• Hugh Belsey is a senior research fellow of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London
George Romney: a Complete Catalogue of his Paintings
Alex Kidson
Yale University Press, three volumes, 960pp, £180 (hb)