What can a portrait reveal about its subject?
George Romney’s Lady Willoughby de Broke is a delightful example of the Grand Manner — a style that revitalized English portraiture in the eighteenth century.
For Grand Manner painters, everything within a portrait represents its subject.
Notice Lady Willoughby’s pose presenting status and strength, through direct eye contact.
Her satin dress, velvet mantle, and stylishly coiffed hair signify wealth and influence, while her grasp of the book implies her education and intelligence.
The portrait and its symbolism work to convey Lady Willoughby’s status and pedigree.
Born Louisa North, she was sister to Lord North, the twelfth Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1770 to 1782, and the wife of fourteenth Baron Willoughby de Broke, John Peyto-Verney, both of titled nobility in the Kingdom.
At the time of this portrait, Britain was experiencing a population explosion with the start of the Industrial Revolution, complicated by social upheaval after losing the American War of Independence.
Meanwhile George Romney — already an established and fashionable portrait painter in London — had just returned from Italy.
Inspired by works from Renaissance artists such as Raphael and Titian, Romney helped popularize the Grand Manner of the English school in the late 1700s.
Led by artists like Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, Grand Manner borrowed poses and gestures from ancient Roman sculpture and Italian Renaissance paintings while using environments and objects to suggest the character of its sitters.
While names like Reynolds and Gainsborough were at the forefront of the movement, Romney was one of the Grand Manner’s most prolific practitioners.
Charging much less than his contemporaries, Romney’s studio journals show more than 1,500 subjects posing for him between March 1776 and December 1795, helping the Grand Manner to become a defining style in European painting for decades to come.
