Last Friday Waddesdon Manor and the University of Buckingham hosted an illuminating conference on art dealing and collecting in the ‘gilded age’ (1880-1940). Brilliantly organised by Jeremy Howard to celebrate the completion of cataloguing the Colnaghi Archive, it featured a host of international speakers on a range of topics, from profiles of the collectors Henry Clay Frick and Henry H. Huntington to aspects of the market from the prices for seventeenth-century Dutch paintings to the celebrity of George Romney. The latter area is of particular interest to us and one which deserves further investigation.

In June 1913 the full-length portrait of Anne de la Pole made £41,370 at Christie’s, then a record price for a painting sold at auction. The purchaser was the firm of Duveen Brothers, whose charismatic head by this date was Joseph Duveen. Duveen in turn sold the portrait to the banker Herbert Stern, 1st Baron Michelham and the painting was sold by his widow in 1926 where it made £46,200; it eventually passed to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. These were huge prices and resulted in an outpouring of scholarly and public interest in Romney. In 1904 Ward and Roberts published their lavish two volume Biographical and Critical Essay with a Catalogue Raisonné sponsored by Agnew’s. An advert in The Connoisseur in 1928 advertised ‘Engravings in Colour’ of Anne de la Pole for the sum of ‘£8.8s’.

Delving into the provenance of Romney’s portraits, particularly of his female sitters, reveal similar astronomical prices and international histories. We recently sold a beautiful pair of bust-length portraits of Sir John and Lady Morshead. Painted in the 1780s they remained with the family until 1902 when they were sold at Christie’s and made the staggering price of 4,100 guineas. The purchaser was another great figure of the ‘gilded age’ art market, Sargent’s friend and patron, Asher Wertheimer. Keen to promote his purchase, Wertheimer secured a full-page illustration of Lady Morshead in Ward and Roberts.

Alex Kidson’s eagerly awaited catalogue raisonné, which is being published by the Paul Mellon Centre next year, will undoubtedly cast further light on Romney-mania during the first decades of the twentieth-century and generate new interest in Romney’s art, although it seems unlikely his work will ever achieve again the prices it did during the ‘gilded age’.