By CONSTANCE D'ARCY MACKAY
Cast :
Incidental Music by JULIAN HERBAGE
THIS is a short one-act play depicting an incident in the life of George Romney , the artist.
George Romney , son of a Lancashire cabinet-maker, was an eighteenth-century painter of such fame that he was regarded as a rival to Sir Joshua Reynolds himself. He married his landlady s daughter, the Mary ' of this play, when he was only twenty-two., and, leaving her in Kendal, saw her hardly at all during his successful career in London and in Italy. Of Lady Hamilton, the ' Divine Emma,' under whose enchantment he fell, he seems to have painted at least forty pictures, including the bewitching ' Lady Hamilton as Bacchante ' in the National Gallery. When he was old and ill and desolate he returned to his wife, who received him without reproach and nursed him until he died. ' This quiet act of hers is worth all Romney's pictures,' said Edward Fitzgerald.
The Scene takes place in the living room of Mary Romney 's cottage in a village in the North of England, in the year 1799. Through the old oak door of the room, which opens on to a wild stretch of moorland scenery, the light of late afternoon shines on Mary Romney as she sits at her spinning wheel. She is no longer young, but age has touched her lightly; her figure is still straight, though her hair is snow-white. There is about her an air of gentle strength, and in her eyes the look of a spirit that is never done 'hoping.
She wears a dress of dove-grey homespun, with a white linen kerchief crossed on her breast.