Study of John Milton

George Romney

1734 Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire – 1802 Kendal

Oil on canvas. 63 x 76 cm. Alex Kidson, George Romney 1734-1802, London 2002, p. 223, ill. 67.

Provenance: The rev. John Romney (the son); Elizabeth Romney (the daughter) (her sale at Christie’s, London, 24-25 May 1894), Private collection, France, Private collection, England

This is a preparatory sketch for Romney’s history painting of Milton and his daughters begun in 1792 (Kidson 2002, no. 138). A number of drawings survive that relate to this subject in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and in sketchbooks at the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino and Princeton University Art Museum. The unfinished sketch, that also includes a ghost-like, abandoned, unidentifiable portrait, shows Milton with his leg thrown over the arm of his chair in a somewhat ungainly pose that was abandoned in the finished painting. In the present sketch Milton appears to be straining to hear but in the finished painting the conception is different; Milton broods and his daughters wait to take down his dictation and inspired words.

Milton became effectively blind in 1651, which became the subject of a personal sonnet. Andrew Marvell was appointed his assistant enabling Milton to continue to write. He managed to produce more anti-Royalist propaganda and was able to complete his most famous epic Paradise Lost published in 1667.

Romney was likely to have been partly inspired to tackle the subject of Milton by his friend, the poet and biographer William Hayley, but his own radical sympathies must also have prompted him. The painting should also be seen in the light of the literary and political controversy surrounding Milton that saw his reputation both damned and championed. Samuel Johnson had written in his The Lives of the Poets, 1781 an opinionated and negative appraisal of his life that had infuriated many of a radical persuasion for whom the republican Milton was a hallowed name. Milton had also received a more balanced appreciation in Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry, 1774-81. Hayley was also partisan and a vigorous defender and he wrote in his Life of Milton, 1794, of him as a true patriot poet.

Romney was a rival to Reynolds and Gainsborough and he produced numerous portraits of eighteenth-century gentry and their children, including such well-known figures as William Beckford and Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton. He was born in the Lake District but moved to London in 1762 to pursue his career. Romney also yearned to develop his talents in the more elevated genre of history painting, as this study of Milton is evidence.

Romney is certainly among the more politically astute and passionate artists during the era of the French revolution along with Barry, Blake and Fuseli. His energetic drawings of the prison reformer and philanthropist John Howard in the Lazaretto of 1791 and his portrait of Thomas Paine of circa 1792, and his interest in Milton, all point to his radical-reformist sympathies. According to David Bindman “For many of the painters and some of the poets their responses to the French Revolution were able to coalesce around the figure of the seventeenth-century poet John Milton, who had himself lived through revolutionary times under Cromwell” (Bindman, p. 166).

Bought by a foundation, Germany.