George Romney (Dalton-in-Furness 1734-1802 Kendal)

Romney's idea for a portrait shows a man in a classic Van Dyck pose, glancing to one side. The artist has made a light pencil sketch which he has then expanded and enlivened through the use of a brush and brown ink. The horizontal pencil line at the level of the subject's knees suggests that this was a study for a three-quarter-length oil.

Romney was one of the major portrait painters of his day and, unlike Reynolds and Gainsborough, he chose not to be associated with the newly-founded Royal Academy, but exhibited his work in his own grand premises in Cavendish Square. Apart from Gainsborough, who produced a formidable corpus of landscape drawings, Romney was the most productive and imaginative draughtsman of the second half of the 18th Century. It is not known whether he made drawings of this kind in the presence of the sitter, to suggest possible compositions for their portrait, or whether they were made privately for his own reference.