Hammer's Echo

"Perhaps the most venerated axiom of criticism is the theory that the pass of time invariably sifts good pictures from bad, destroys the latter, and holds up the former to the admiration of succeeding generations. It is a comforting theory. It convinces the connoisseur of his good taste, and solaces the nameless artist for years of neglect. Just why it should be believed remains a mystery, for all too often the evidence points to its converse. Artificial flowers last longest." Thus, some years ago, wrote a critic. Last week his view was given singular proof in a London auction room. The scene was Christie's. An elegant company, in satins and swallowtails, lounged before the auctioneer's rostrum, watching some gentlemen talk with their fingers. They talked in an ancient language, for they were dealer's agents, and their nodding heads, their twitching forefingers, indicated bids of a thousand, of ten thousand pounds. When a little picture on the scaffold (George Romney's portrait of Mrs. Davenport, seated, 30 by 25 inches) was knocked down to Sir Joseph Duveen's man for approximately $260,000, the elegant watchers burst into applause. Romney's Lady Hamilton brought $65,000. And Sir Joshua Reynold's Cimon and Iphigenia brought $60. And Van Dyke's Infant Bacchanals brought $15. The applause of the patrons of Christie was quite in the best tradition. It has always been the habit of the fashionable world to applaud the picture of the late Mr. Romney. That the works of his immortal betters went for prices that are commonly paid for art calendars, iron lawn-dogs, and imitation ikons was merely one more illustration of the fact that time will tell--lies. "Now," said a critic, commenting, in 1802, upon the death of Artist Romney, "he belongs to the ages." That statement is applied to all popular painters at death, but in the case of George Romney it was singularly accurate. The ages have adopted him, his theatricality, his sentimentality, his clever color, his stilted drawing. Alone, perhaps, of all the draughtsmen of his period, he paid no attention to posterity. Therefore posterity took him to her bosom. He painted to please his patrons, to make a living. He still pleases the patrons of Sir Joseph Duveen, and the sale of one of his portraits makes the living of a dozen dealers. In his lifetime he had one enemy --Reynolds. He had no rivals. Sir Joshua and Gainsborough were his superiors; they never stooped to rival him, Yet secretly they envied, even then, his popularity. Sir Joshua in his later period (he was eight years older than Romney) would not speak of him by name. He said, "The Man in Cavendish Square. . . ." Romney never retaliated by branding Reynolds as "The Man in St. Martin's Lane," "The Dauber in Great Newport Street," or "The Lump in Leicester Square," although the latter made residence, at one time or another, in all these thoroughfares. Romney never retaliated at all, for, to the end of his life, Reynolds frightened him. In the first place, Romney had been born behind the vulgar door of trade. His father was a cabinetmaker. Reynolds was of the gentry, a clergyman's son. And Reynolds would take for mistress nothing less than a duchess with ten quarterings, while Romney had only Emma--gentle Emma Hart, who later became Lady Hamilton, whom he was forever painting, as Magdalene, as Circe, Joan of Arc, Cassandra, Phylida, and Bacchante. Besides, there was a woman in Dorset whom Romney married in a regretted moment, deserted for 25 years, and went back to in that sad year when, gouty and depressed, he wanted a kiss to comfort his dying. But what really put him in awe of Reynolds was something that happened in the Academy. Sir Joshua was president--in name. In plain fact he was the Academy. Rising, faultlessly wigged, from his emblazoned chair, he told the members how to vote, yawning a little behind his long, white fingers. It amused him to spin out his sentences, to hesitate, grope for a word as if he could never get it and then, into an anguished pause, drop a phrase as polished as a stone. He knew that nobody believed he wrote his own discourses. People accused his literary friends--Burke, Pitt, Sterne, Goldsmith. An aberrant youth even went so far as to question Dr. Johnson on the subject, causing that lexicographer a seizure. "He would as soon have me paint his pictures, Sir, as write his speeches." The subject for debate, on this particular afternoon, was a prize to be awarded some competitors of the Society of Artists. Romney had sent his Death of General Wolfe and the jury, moved by the rigid grandeur of the Hero of Quebec, was about to give it the money, when Sir Joshua Reynolds took a pinch of snuff. All the Academicians stared, aghast, such was the distaste, the hauteur of the presidential sneeze. Hastily they ordered Romney's study to be borne away, conferred the prize on a forgotten portraiteer named Mortimer. The Man in Cavendish Square was solaced with a sop of fifty pounds. Hearing, perhaps, in death the echo of that sneeze, he heard also the fall of Christie's hammer.