Excerpt from RomneyThat, I think, is the secret of Romney's popularity - for popular he undoubtedly is. The slowness of his rise to fame, as the sale room measures fame, is due largely to the fact that he is not an artist's artist There are moments when his drawing is positively wild there are instances when his wonderful instinct for decorative design, combined with the broad temerity of his brushwork, reduce his work almost to the quality of a lovely wall-decoration, with human form added to it as an accident. The purity and unerring harmony of his colour so far transcend the vitality of some of his portraits as portraits, that the picture, divested of all reference to anything but itself, can be, and is, enjoyed simply as a thing of beauty - and on this ground the mere layman can share a stand point with the professional critic and the theorist in aesthetic.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.