A Portrait Painter: In 1969, by appointment of President Nixon, Romney became secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
ROMNEY, rom'ne, George, English painter: b. Beckside, near Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, Eng., Dec. IS, 1734; d. Kendal, Eng., Nov. 15, 1802. His father was a cabinetmaker, and the boy learned this trade, but he also taught himself drawing and woodcarving and at 19 was apprenticed to a portrait painter at Kendal named Steele. In 1757 he entered a career as portrait painter, and after local success went to London (1762), leaving his wife (whom he married in 1756) and his two children in Kendal.
RAEBURN, ra'bern, SIR Henry, Scottish portrait painter : b. Stockbridge, near Edinburgh, Scotland, March 4, 1756; d. there, July 8, 1823. He was left an orphan at an early age and was apprenticed to a goldsmith, who, perceiving his talent for drawing, encouraged him in his ambition to be an artist. The favorite portrait painter in Edinburgh at that time was David Martin, who was the only instructor Raeburn ever had. He formed his style, however, by copying in color, mezzotints from the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and while he learned the chiaroscuro of that master he never attained his almost Italian richness and solidity of coloring.
In his experimentation, unfortunately, Reynolds often used impermanent mediums and resorted to a thick impasto which has cracked with time. As a draftsman, too, he had his limitations. Nevertheless, he is still ranked as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of English portrait painters. John Ruskin could say of him, in the second lecture of Two Paths: "Considered as a painter of individuality in the human form and mind, I think him, even as it is, the prince of portrait-painters. Titian paints nobler pictures and Vandyck had nobler subjects, but neither of them entered so subtly as Sir Joshua did into the minor varieties of human heart and temper." |
