 This is your water isn't it? It is. I'm going to comment here. Well, good evening, good evening everybody, and a very warm welcome to The Paul Mellon Centre. I'm Martin Porcel, I'm the senior research fellow here, or one of the senior research fellows here at the centre, ac mae'n amlwg i'n gweithio, i'n gweithio i gael y gael y gweithio, ymgyrchau, ym 4-6 yma yn y cysylltu cyfwyr cyfwyr cyfwyr. A'r cyfwyr yn ymgyrchio'n gweithio, felly mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Ond rwy'n gofyn nhw'n gwneud, sy'n gweithio'n gweithio, yw ymwysig yw rwy'n gweithio'r cyfwyr cyfwyr cyfwyr, Ychydig y gallu'r gwrs yng Nghaerlen o'r holl o'r ddau'r cymdeithas. Mae'n rhan o'r ffog o'r cymdeithas. A'r rhan o'r cymdeithas i'r cymdeithas cymdeithas. Felly, ychydig yn gwneud cymdeithas, os gallwn i ddim yn ddweud, os ydych chi'n ddweud y cwestiynau o'r ddau i chi, a'r ddylai'r ystod y gallu'n iawn i'r ddweud i ddweud i ffodol i'r disgusion. A ganddo gyda'r ysgrif iawn, mae'n mynd i ddweud i'r ystod. Mae'r ysgrif iawn i'r ffordd i gilyddio'r ysgrif iawn. Mae'n gweithio'n myic, yn y rhan, a mae'n ganddo'r ysgrif iawn i'r ysgrif iawn. Mae'r ddweud a'r gyfaint sy'n gwybod, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae yw Mark, ydw i'n rhaid i'r marg. Mae'r ysgolwyddon o ddod hynny o ddod yn cael ei wneud. Felly rwy'n ddod y gallwn ychydig ymlaen cael ei ddondol yn y rhaid. Mae'n ddod hynny o ddod ar y dyfodol, mae'n ddod hynny o ddod. Mae Mark oedd yn cael ei wneud o'r ddod yn cael ei ddod o ddod. Mae'n ddod y cwestiwn ar y bydd yma. Mae'n ddod Richard yn gallu cyfleoedd gyfan y cyfnod cymryd. As me as I say. I staff on the Zoom chat box in front of house and once we've finished our deliberations around 7.30 You're invited to join the drinks in the anti room or if you've got other plans you may leave and will be finished by 8 o'clock. One thing I must do is read this notice out to you. It's the pre-event safety notice. There are no fire drills schedules for the duration of this event. If the fire alarm sounds, leave your belongings behind and calmly begin to evacuate the building, your nearest fire exits are on the ground floor through either of the front doors, that's N16 where you came in, or N15, you've got two front doors, but that's the one we usually use. This is very important, please assemble outside number 28 Bedford Square. Shouldn't you just go outside and stand on the pavement, yna'r gilydd, mae'n gilydd i'n meddwl i chi i gael gwybod i'n meddwl i'r temer, mae'n rwy'n meddwl i'r bobl i gyd. Felly, rwy'n meddwl i chi i gael. Rwy'n meddwl i chi wedi bod yn gallu gweld o'r gilydd. Felly, mae'n meddwl i chi wedi meddwl i'r gilydd. Mae'n edrych i chi, ac mae'n meddwl i chi'n mynd i'n gilydd o'i gilydd ar gyfer y dde. Felly, mae'n meddwl i'r byw. Mae'r gilydd i'r gilydd yma. Mae rai ddweud â'r drwyddoch dynchol Nicos Robins. Nicos rwyf wedi'u gwneud y bêl a'r phwng Gael Baroness de Llywodraeth, a dd Since 2020, he's been a lecturer in British Art at University College London. Currently he's writing a book on the aesthetic, scientific, cultural history of climate in the 19th century Britain. His recent article reexamining the relationship of John Constable and Luke Howard's meteorological aesthetics if we receive the 2022 emerging Scholars Award from the 19th Century Studies Association. So congratulations to you on Nick for that. Right now Nick's ongoing research projects include questions of individuation and incarceration in the Drawings of George Romney exhibition cultures and the spacialized articulation of racial difference in the early 19th century, elemental mediums and the deposition of history in the work of artists and thinkers like Charles Babbage Winslow Homer Yn yw Elizabeth Bishop ac mae unreg yn rhaid i bethau ar nifer wrth ddoch chi'n bydd gynhyrchion hogar yn gysylltiadro yr Ynryder Ynryd Oo, a mwy o'r cymdeithas, mae'n dda i'r clywed o'r cymdeithas. A yw JARP Bulletin 2021, Rhynてch chi'n unrhyw o'r Llywodraeth, a'r Esthedeg i')an yw Llywodraeth. Ac rhaid i'r llaw o'ch gweithio cyllewyr yn ynfawr ar y Sut Llywodraeth, yn y byl brand Henry Mawr, a'r GweithGyfrifiad, ar y cyfnogi, ac rwyf arferwyr yma, Martina Droth. Mae Paul Messier. Ieg, rwyf yn meddwl, os yw'r cyfnogi yw'r cyfnogi gan Cyfnogi, o'r Cyfnogi am Llyfrgell Pwysigau, o'r Cyfnogi, Thomas Cull, Ysgol Llantych, gan ymgyrch i'r cyfnogi, gan ynghylch ar Efallai Gwlywodraeth. ers yw am elu gŷt blaenau y gallau y nidolid yn 2018. Nid yw dewch yn drosol gyda yw ein cyfnod ar y cyfnod, ychydig y gallwn gweithio gyrhaeth ar lineil lŷl George Romney. Mae'n amser repliedwyr ma' llai. Fyddwn i'n gweithio chi i chiadlech yn gallwn. Fyth ydych i'r sŵn youriau o perthyniad o bobl yw'r rhanol iawn i'r hyn yw'r cyfrys o rhan o'r ddryg. Rydyn ni'n gweithio chi'n gwych i'r fforddiol. Yn credu cerdog. I thank you, Martin, for that very nice introduction, and thank you for having me as part of this wonderful series. And thank you to the other speakers who have already contributed great things to it. Before I jump in, I also just want to thank Nermin Abdulla and Esme Bogus for making it all possible, and a special thanks to my soon Rehani for helping me get wonderful images of the drawings I'll show you tonight, and thank you all for coming. I'll just jump right in. The painter George Romney tended to shun the public nature of the artist's profession in late 18th century Britain. Something of his relationship to self-display can be insinuated from this large group portrait finished late in his life around 1796. It depicts in front and centre the poet and patron of arts, William Haley, who stands confidently in a long blue cape and resting firmly on a cane. To his left is the sculptor John Flaxman, one of Haley's friends and protégés, shown carving Haley's likeness on a large bust at the edge of the canvas, his finger resting on the declivity in the chin of the bust. Leaning in serpentine pose before Flaxman is Thomas Alfonso Haley, William Haley's illegitimate son who was training as a sculptor under Flaxman. This painting stages art making as a scene of reciprocity and intimacy, as well as something quite grave and rather serious. But Haley's grand stare is both doubled and strangely undermined by the figure at the left of the canvas. He smiles oddly, almost impishly or coyly behind his spectacles, turning to look at us over his shoulder and brandishing a palette with a few touches of paint. This you might guess is Romney himself. The painting was intended as a record of friendship and the illumined circle of Haley's patronage, but this light of visibility and clarity that produces that unity is qualified by the register of obscurity into which Romney seems to vanish. This group portrait dramatizes something fundamental about the career of George Romney. He was one of the most sought after portrait painters in Georgian London, producing a voluminous and varied set of likenesses of the wealthy aristocratic and notable members of British society, as in the paintings you see here on screen. He famously vied with Joshua Reynolds for preeminence in the field of portraiture, at least for a time, and his reputation as a serious painter and a favorite of the market lasted well into the early 20th century before it sharply declined. He also, at the same time, refused to participate in the official spaces of sociability and professional self advancement, particularly the exhibitions of the Royal Academy, and all but stopped exhibiting his paintings by the end of his career. And yet throughout that career Romney would pursue alongside his business of producing such portraits, a very different enterprise that took place largely in private. The development of a radical and in many cases quite anomalous ideas for history paintings, whose effective charge and aesthetic language sharply differed from the public image of the social world enacted in his portraits. The looseness and gestural freedom of his drawings has always puzzled viewers used to the exacting lucidity and restraint of his portrait paintings. My talk tonight will examine the largest group of these works, a set of drawings that Romney made in preparation for a painting that would celebrate the life of John Howard, who gained renown in the 1770s as an advocate for prison reform in Britain and in Europe more broadly. Howard cast light on what a later biographer would call the prison world of Europe, the corrupt practices of jailers, the dangerous conditions of incarceration, and the abuses of power that undermined the potentially reforming capacity of those institutions. And in the early 1790s Romney made by some counts, over 500 drawings at a variety of scales and in different media, in which he developed ideas for a painting that would show Howard visiting a crowded foreboding prison room, one of which you see here. But Romney never completed the painting. It would be easy to make too much of this failure. What would it have meant for Romney to make a painting that showed, however, obliquely, the stratum of misery, which the stark changes in 18th century property relations had produced the very changes that had occasion the wealth of many of his sitters. The drawings of Howard and the prison world stage a space of shadows that not unlike Romney's own learing presence in the shadow of the circle of his friends deflates the certainties of self possessed identity and prosperity put forward in his portraits. These kinds of questions motivate my talk and yet they're also in some ways unanswerable. And then I want to think about why this subject fascinated Romney, and what the strange hold was that this world had upon him this imagined prison. And so I'll first introduce Romney's work and his earlier explorations in historical painting and give a brief overview of prisons and prison reform in this moment before turning to the complex interplay between Howard's work Romney's drawings and the adumbrated figures of the prison world as they play out across the series of these strange works. Historical painting, the multi figure depiction of a narrative from literature antiquity or history was as you'll have heard already in this course, the highest aim for artists in the 18th century academic system. Fortritcher which Romney called cursed drudgery was the way in which artists were able to form earn a living, but it was the constant indexed struggle of 18th century British artists to develop a notion of history painting which would be adequate to the economic social and political conditions of British art and society. Romney's ambition from the very beginning of his career was to contribute to this effort. Indeed, one of the very first paintings Romney exhibited upon his arrival to London in 1762. After a few years as a provincial portrait painter was a work called the death of general wolf. Now this painting subject, the dying major major general James wolf a hero in the 1759 battle for Quebec during the seven years war will be familiar to you already. As Esther Chadwick discussed in her lecture, it would be later taken up by the Anglo American painter Benjamin West in her 1777 in his 1770 entry to the Royal Academy exhibition. Like West's later work, Romney's painting broke with academic conventions representing the protagonist of historical painting in contemporary garb. But unlike West's work, the painting did not bring Romney such fame and was snubbed indeed for a prize when it was first exhibited in 1763. Yet he did manage to slowly build up a successful portrait practice in London over the 1760s while continuing to pursue works that might demonstrate his other aspirations. One of my very favorite of these, which was the first painting by Romney I really looked at closely is his painting the artists brothers Peter and James exhibited in 1766. In this work Romney stages through the medium of his two brothers, his idea of artistic practice. His brother James stands leaning on the chair, looking down onto a drawing easel at which his brother Peter sits and which displays a piece of paper with geometrical figures. James meanwhile gestures downwards to a classical bust on the table beside them. Like Romney's wolf this painting suggests that Romney aim to show both himself and the art of painting in the most ambitious light possible as a learned philosophical undertaking drawing on abstract and antique learning. And it was the need to accrue the latter that motivated Romney in 1772 to leave for travels in Italy where he might gain access to the great works of antiquity and Renaissance painting. Perhaps more decisive for him on that trip was his exposure to the work and particularly the drawings of this of Henry Fusili the Swiss artist than resident in Rome. Fusili's paired down tonally dramatic and effectively charged drawings, which often took scenes of extremity, such as exorcism and visionary site as their subject exercised a considerable and long lasting effect on Romney. And while this influence was not quite evident in the newly accomplished portraits he would complete upon his return to England in 1775. He did continue to explore this new figurative language in drawing, this time at grand scale in these enormous drawings now in Liverpool, which he completed in the 1770s. These so called cartoons stage multiple layers of visionary or dream like experience in which scenes of bodily struggle and vulnerability play out. And though they were intended to be worked up into history paintings such ambitions were continually deferred and so I think it's interesting to think about how even in this this earlier moment right drawing is this really key space for Romney's thinking. Romney's conflicted ambition to his relationship to his ambition for for history painting might be seen as the real subject of the group portrait I started with. As Romney's patron Haley William Haley was constantly urging the artist to realize his ideas for history paintings and to take on a leading role in the world of English art. Romney formed part of the circle of artists that Haley often gathered at his home earthen, which included the sculpture, the sculptor flaxman poets William Cooper and Charlotte Smith and William Blake. The latter would eventually find Haley's interventions into his friends professional life to be a bit too much penning a poem on Haley's friendship in which he writes quote when Haley finds out that you cannot do that is the very thing he'll set you to. This we might say was the dynamic between Haley and Romney as well who was constantly being urged to produce pictures he was never able to complete. And his drawings on the subject of john Howard, a particular obsession of Haley's were one such project prison though was not a known subject to Romney before he started these works for other reasons. Here we can return to the painting of the conversation between his two brothers. James Romney his older brother served in the Bombay army and spent the majority of his life in British India. His brother Peter meanwhile attempted to follow his older brother George into the life of an artist. But he was plagued by mental instability and financial problems and in 1774 he was in his own words quote arrested and cast into prison by Mr's all wooden Murray his his creditors. Rest was so public that it was known by everybody directly, though my imprisonment has lost me the opinion of a few people not worth having. It has interested several in my behalf, though he got out of jail by other by means of such others generosity. He died soon after in 1777. This incident in Romney's own life illuminates a number of key issues beyond the painter's own experience dealing with the social and personal turmoil associated with incarceration debtors made up a large portion of imprisoned persons in 18th century Britain. More than half of the population in jail and Peter Romney would have been one of the two to 4000 people arrested by their creditors each year. Alongside debtors were those arrested on criminal charges, but unlike today prolonged incarceration was not a prevalent form of punishment in the 18th century. Instead, punishments like banishment or display in the pillory might be prescribed, while for more serious offenses or at least offenses considered to be more serious. The usual punishments were execution or forcible transportation abroad to North America. Over the course of the 18th century, the latter punishments were handed down for a sharply increasing number of crimes. Most of them having to do with theft or damage of property, many as a result of new property rights which were seized by means of the enclosure of lands that were formerly held in common. And as Meredith Gamer has charted in her really important work, which will be familiar to those who attended the online lectures on Hogarth. I think last year or the year before the spectacle of execution, which was always public exerted a grave hold on the public imagination and indelibly shaped the forms of art making in the 18th century. So jails in this moment then were mostly places of temporary confinement before execution or transportation. Before the war of independence in North America, the American colonies were the most usual destination for those transported somewhere between 30 and 60,000 people over the course of the 18th century. But the loss of these colonies in 1776 led to a particular problem for Britain's prison population, which began to build up precipitously in what was widely seen as a crisis. The solution to which officials resorted was holding the imprisoned in old Navy vessels or hulks docked in the Thames that were notorious for the dangerous and unhealthy conditions and signs that Britain's piece mail system of jails and prisons was breaking down. There had been periodic efforts to examine and reform prison practices such as a 1729 committee in the House of Commons which investigated practices at the debtors prison the fleet in London which Hogarth made into a painting. And while this is framed as a benevolent if anomalous anomalous project of social concern, the most proximate cause for these periodic attempts to reform prisons was less one of charity. Rather it was the specter of jail fever, or what we would now call typhus and the threat that it spread could pose to society outside of the prison which spurred on most public concern for reform. These outbreaks led to periodic but uncoordinated calls for reforming the unhealthy conditions of British jails and I'll draw your attention briefly to a really interesting scheme for ventilating new gate prison which we can talk about more. Such concerns were the backdrop for the work of john Howard, the reformer to whose life and work Romney's drawings were dedicated. Howard was born in 1726 to a prosperous non conforming family, yet was not interested in most of the trappings of such a leisurely life. But when he was appointed in 1773 as the high sheriff of Bedfordshire he found as it were his calling. The position of high sheriff was an office, often passed around to different members of the gentry in 18th century Britain, and one that was often neglected. Howard though decided to take this position a bit more seriously and it was in this capacity that he first visited a prison, the local prison in Bedford. Arriving there he was shocked to see prisoners who had been acquitted of their crimes, but would not be let out because they owed fees to the jailers to secure their release, a widespread practice among jailers to generate revenue. And so this led Howard on a long quest to investigate these corrupt practices and jails across England, where he quote the held scenes of calamity which I grew daily more and more anxious to alleviate. The result of his investigations was published in 1776 as State of the Prisons in England and Wales and sparked a widespread almost sensational consciousness about the need for reform, one that made Howard famous as an exemplar of the 18th century ideal of philanthropy. And before turning to the drawings, I think it's important to say that Howard was not in any way opposed to the idea of incarceration or the need for punishment. On the contrary, he was more incensed that what he did find in the jail was an inefficient and corrupt system, one that enriched those in charge of overseeing them. Well, the spaces in which that they oversaw were full of, you know, drinking and gambling and other immoral practices. These prisons were also choked with diseased air which needed to be circulated and dispelled, walls whitewashed to stave off the threat of jail fever. And so in this sense, Howard wanted prisons to be better in that he wanted them to work toward the reform of the mind and the body and toward a different version of society. This then is the kind of reforming spirit that Romney might have aimed to represent. So let's turn them to the drawings. Here is one of the large ink wash and graphite drawings that Romney made probably about 1790 or 92. On the left hand, a square of light centres on the figure of Howard, shown pointing at a jailer who holds a massive key. Echoing the shape and gesture of Howard's left arm, we see a dark diagonal shadow that overtakes the space hovering over the bodies of prisoners masked near the ground. Some are slumped over in agony while others hold out upstretched faces and arms toward Howard and the jailer. It is a scene of confrontation. Howard seems with one arm to hover over the abject bodies of the prisoners in an act of protection or almost benediction. Through the other arm pointing to the jailer, he accuses him almost as if to push him out of the edge or out of the picture itself by the force of his disapproval. It is a scene then which has all the elements of history painting. We are placed within a scene of dramatic action in which a gesture sets the figures of the painting in motion. It frames Howard as a world historical protagonist, one whose force of conviction is imagined to be able to hold the whole painting together. Like Romney's earlier efforts in the 1760s, it was also a modern history painting that is a painting which depicted the more recent past and which attempted to make out of the present something timeless, instructive and grand. It was perhaps this reason why William Haley had originally suggested that Romney make a portrait of Howard, a suggestion that Howard refused and then instead a history painting. While it was not until later at this moment that Romney began to make this series of drawings, his first attempt at such a picture was in 1780 when he provided the frontispiece for a long and quite terrible poem that Haley wrote about the reformer. This image engraved by Francesco Bartolazzi is a much simpler, almost diagrammatic version of the scene we just saw in his later drawing. The figures have been reduced to three, the prisoner seeming to expire in chains on the left, the rough-faced jailer, his arms held behind him and Howard at the center, his hand raised as if taken aback. Beyond a few interesting details, like the engraved lines that hover over the prisoner's body seeming to dissolve along with the waning life of the prisoner, it is a rather straightforward image. The generalized setting recalls some of the other images of imprisonment which fellow artists would produce around this time, such as Joseph Wright of Derby's The Captive, seen here in a 1787 engraving, whose subject was derived from Laurence Stern's sentimental journey. The distinction, of course, is that Romney's picture shifts our attention solely from the prisoner. In Wright's picture, we occupy the place of the viewer of sensibility, responding with pity to Stern's literary character. While in Romney's frontispiece, Howard comes into view instead as the central subject of the picture, it is his response to the sight of the prisoner which we are called upon to witness, not the prisoner's plight itself. This sense of Howard is a kind of roving prosthetic of the cult of philanthropic sensibility, is thus both the subject and the problem of the picture Romney wanted to make. And that problem then was, what exactly is the dramatic action? Is it Howard's gesture of confrontation? Was it the staging of his act of witness to the horrors of the prison world? I think it was this problem of action where it could be situated, one which haunted many history painters at this moment. I think it was this problem that dog Romney over the four years that he's spent making these hundreds of drawings for the scene. In this one, for example, the same elements remain yet shift in their emphasis. Strangely, the jailer's body grows larger and more menacing as he turns his back to us while Howard's body shrinks, except for the dark claw that hangs over a man holding up the expiring body of a woman. Meanwhile, different ink washes pick out more closely the corpse like body, which is lying on the table to the right and the imploring heads that seem to emerge out of thickened obscurity. The image is thus divided into a zone of action in Howard's figure and a zone of dissolution or collapse, which nevertheless distracts from the image's supposed subject. In other drawings, such shifting of perspective and focus grows vertiginous. Here we seem to have had our viewpoint brought low to the ground, not sharing the lofty world of Howard's vantage on the scene, but instead taking on the view of the prison's victims. The dying man is low to the ground, a figure kneels over him as if to press their head against his heart, and a child stands leaning over the body while another female figure leans back covering her face in agony. Instead of appealing outward for justice, Howard seems almost to be backing away, although the damage to the drawings sheet may be part of this effect. Sorry. Meanwhile, the shadowy atmosphere above the figures of the prisoners takes on a new, almost demonic life. Given the focus in Howard's work on the dangerous era of prisons, this seems plausible. Indeed, in another variation on the composition, this dark suggestion of atmosphere hardens into a kind of shadowy, reclining, deathful figure to which Howard seems to be pointing. Is the protagonist of the picture then even potentially this malign atmosphere? Looking at these shifting scenes, it becomes clear that an uncertainty about the focus and the locus of action itself was the problem Romney was attempting to work through. He was also doing so at a time when history painting was under another pressure of crisis, though not in Britain, but in revolutionary France and indeed Romney was witness to this. In August of 1790, just as he started working on some of his early drawings for the Howard painting, he traveled to Paris. Here we must note Romney's politics, which were unconventionally radical. Like his friends, he was very sympathetic to the cause of liberty in France and to the kinds of energies coursing through Europe in this moment. In his first trip, he came into contact with many key figures in this early stage of the French Revolution. Most influential of these was likely the artist Jacques-Louis David, whose studio Romney visited and with whom he met a few times. While other major paintings by David have a strong and traceable influence on Romney, it seems likely that in August 1790 he would have also have seen David's ongoing studies for his painting, The Tennis Court Oath. Recording the decisive June 1789 meeting of the Third Estate. Many drawings David made for this subject never resulted in a finished picture as the events of the revolution took on their own life. And as such the provisional nature of drawing comes into stand for the uncertainties of paintings capacity to respond to moments of turmoil and upheaval. The study of British responses to the French Revolution, David Beinman has suggested that it is in his Howard in Romney's drawings of Howard that we can see most strongly the impact of the French Revolution on Romney, particularly the staging of sort of mercy and courage in Howard and the power of reason to liberate humanity from suffering. It was kind of mercy and courage that Howard displayed was at the center of this cult of philanthropic feeling that I've been mentioning in which Howard became elevated as a hero. And it was Romney's job to find a language of gestures that could communicate this just as it was David's to find a language of gestures that could communicate revolutionary. Here the expression and disposition of Howard's body itself then takes on a very particular importance as a means of modeling this kind of witnessing. And interestingly, Howard himself was very interested in the way he needed to carry himself, not only to project a sense of his purpose but also indeed to protect his body from the contagion of the prison. In one of his notebooks that he carried around on his visits to prisons, he wrote, seemingly only to himself, that quote, to maintain the rights of others requires strength and vigor of constitution, wisdom in the conduct of affairs and the firmness, which can baffle difficulties and dangers. Thus, temperance, prudence and fortitude are necessary to practice justice. This emphasis on emotions and passions though also had a basis in theories of medicine that held that powerful negative emotions like grief and fear. I'm drawing on the work here of Kevin Sienna who wrote a great book on the subject that these powerful negative emotions could actually make one's body more susceptible to disease. The way that Howard sort of prepared himself right to enter into the prison was also to take on a certain kind of emotional or even affective stance. And we could, we could think about how the gesture of his bodies could be seen, not only as something outwardly expressive right, but also is as something of an inward layer of protection, in which emotion is not about connection but in fact separation. In this regard we can turn to one of the key sources in Romney's development as an artist, the work of the French academician Charles Le Brun on the passions, in which he mapped out the expressions of different passions that is emotions and affects upon the body and its gestures. It was one of the earliest books Romney had access to in the 1750s as he trained as an artist, and he seemed in the 1790s to return strongly to this model in his Howard drawings. Take this work in which a sort of Davidian architecture of arches has been added to the scene. It is something close for shortening of the bodies and their outstretched arms on the left strongly resemble David's oath of the Horatia. While the substance of their bodies is only faintly gestured out in the, in the sort of wash that Romney uses to build up the tones in the image. He also overlaid these forms with ink, especially in the faces to show the almost bulging intensity of their facial gestures of appeal. The prisoners in the jailer congregating around the figure of Howard also show this range of fear and grief, supplication and horror. Howard's face though is a bit different. It shows clearly this meeting of furrowed brows, strong wrinkles forming on the forehead as if to show measured concern, but not quite passionate intensity. There's slightly more ambiguity though in the rest of his body. He's returned to the sheet to add these sort of intense scribbles in graphite around Howard's arms and hands, which are raised in this ambivalent gesture of response. And while the graphite adds a kind of gravity to Howard's hands and the shadow that it casts on the jailer behind him. This scribbling seems at once to kind of redouble the force of the gesture and also to cancel it out altogether. As Howard's own lists of his sort of passions, right, temperance, prudence and fortitude suggests there was something of a conflict regarding these questions of emotion and sympathy at this moment, one which ran along the lines of class. The passions presented a problem for 18th century conceptions of the sense of senses and this of sensibility, and it was passions that paintings were most often intended to regulate rather than elicit or promote. It was also such passions like lust, envy or intoxication that were imagined to lead people into criminal into criminality and dissolution and indeed to lead to incarceration. On the other hand, the kind of regulated passions that that Howard lists as his right laid the road to the philanthropic capacities that he modeled for a whole generation of British reformers. The dispassionate nature of Howard's writing, which when counterposed with the strong almost sort of crazed response that elicited in the British public is often noted. The only passage in his book, The State of the Prisons, which seems to dwell in any stronger emotion is its very opening passage on distress. He writes, there are prisons into which whoever looks will at the first sight of the people confined there be convinced that there is some great error in the management of them. The Salo meager countenances declare without words that they are very miserable. Many who went unhealthy are in a few months changed to emaciated dejected objects. Some are seen pining under diseases expiring on the floors in loathsome cells of pestilential fevers and the confluence smallpox victims I must not say to the cruelty, but I will say to the inattention of sheriffs and gentlemen in the commission of the peace. This is a very kind of conflicted passage, I think. On the one hand, in a way which might have appealed to a painter like Romney, we are enjoying to see how the very faces of the prisoners right there Salo meager countenance express without any need for language that how they have become these dejected objects. But Howard also backs away from the language of accusation. These prisoners are not the victims of cruelty, but of inattention. And the form of attention which Howard then paid in return was a relatively new one, the language of objective enumeration numbers statistics facts figures. His description of every jail and prison in England does not repeat this scene of dejection but instead gives data about the demographics of its population the size of its cells, the visibility of regulations. In this sense, it is a language of distance rather than proximity. Howard did not wish to draw his rears close to the scene but rather to situate them in this distance position of knowledge. It's fitting in this sense that one of Howard's protocols to protect himself from jail fever, following his prison visits was the fumigation of his clothes as well as the notebooks in which he recorded all of his information. After his immersion in the offensive air of a prison, he notes the leaves of my memorandum book were often so tainted that I could not use it till after spreading in an hour or two before the fire. Howard imagined rightly or not that the contagion of the jail remained in the very paper he used to record his observations like a scent lingering in his clothes and in response aim to purify them of this condition. In this sense, it's more of an anesthetic, a kind of dampening response, or even a kind of prophylactic against proximity than a conception of a sensory immediacy or proximity. What kind of response might Romney have imagined these drawings would garner especially if they had been made into a painting as he intended. In an essay on quote those kinds of distress which excite agreeable sensation and a barbo claimed that we have indeed a strong sympathy with all kinds of misery but is a feeling of pure unmixed pain, similar in kind though not equal into degree in degree to what we feel for ourselves on the like occasions. And this never produces that melting sorrow that thrill of tenderness to which we give the name of pity. They are two distinct sensations marked by very different external expression. One causes the nerve to tingle the flesh to shudder and the whole countenance to be thrown into strong contractions. The other relaxes the frame opens the features and produces tears. Any display of misery had to be framed barbo, or so barbo thought by this display of moral excellence, which in the case of Romney's drawings would have been Howard's resolve right this display of restrained response this distance. And it's also worth noting that Barbo's brother john achon was Howard's close friend and executor. In 1790 Romney would have begun to make these images at the very moment that visual culture would be mobilized at large scales to affect moral change. We can think here most prominently at the cause to abolish the transatlantic slave trade and images like the 1787 broadside of a slave ship published by the society for affecting the abolition of the slave trade. Indeed figures like William Wilber first and Thomas Clarkson were explicitly seen as Howard's heirs in a tradition of philanthropic action. In this moment images of both cruelty and supplication were mobilized to manufacture sentiment among the British public but also to contain the threat of social destabilization that abolition would have meant to a society whose wealth was founded on enslaved labor. The question of the treatment of prisoners in Britain is of course not comparable in terms of cruelty and dispossession, but his work then I want to suggest Romney's drawings about Howard exist in a kind of continuum with these larger projects of the reformation refinement of British morality. And yet one wonders whether had Romney ever completed a painting anything like his drawings, whether it would have had this force of a reforming picture. Here we can compare it with a painting and a print that was indeed finished and published Francis Wheatley's 1787 engraving and etching visiting and relieving the miseries of a prison. Depicting Howard shown gesturing to a family group gathered in a dungeon, an old man lying on a bed of straw. The stock roles of the incarcerated figures in the prison are not far from the worthy poor, who would then later be pictured, who would also be pictured at the same time in paintings by Thomas Gainsborough or George Moreland presenting them as proper objects of concern. This didn't seem to be Romney's aim, at least in the way that his drawings now speak to us. If Howard tried to purge the air of the prison from his notebooks, which he saw as the source source of death and disease, it seems Romney's drawings almost do the opposite. Look at this one for example. Though it's unfinished of course the entire substance of the image seems to be a kind of loaded atmosphere as if the image were seeped in it. The broad arch of the prison space is articulated by modeling varied shades of depth into which figures in the background merge. The bodies of the prisoners are masked below, but the faint nervous outline of their body does not suggest that these figures possess a kind of autonomous corporeality, but instead to seem to be permeated by the air, particularly as it gathers in thick darkness around their bodies. A figure of Howard shown in an under drawing and layered ink washes is barely distinguishable from the space around him. More than the problem of gesture then and its legibility what seems to be at stake here is the very separateness of each of these bodies, both from neighboring bodies, but also from the environment around it right articulating them as the sort of separate protagonists in a painting. And this problem of picturing the bodies of the incarcerated interestingly relates to Howard's own thinking about the dangerous and damaging conditions of the prison. During the 18th century prisoners were almost exclusively housed in communal rooms, but a number of writers and reformers began to urge a cellular model of incarceration. Placing of prisoners into separate rooms whether permanently or for sleeping or you know at night. In Howard's case his advocacy for the separation of prisoners was both for purposes of sort of physical health but also purposes of moral health right to sort of individuate and to separate out the prisoners from one another. Romney on the other hand seems to have been too interested in this tangle of bodies that could not be separated from one another, and the charged feeded air in which they were set. The figures in his drawings follow a kind of stock characterization, even as they morph and mutate from drawing to drawing. A mother and child a woman swooning a female figure who leans over the edge of the image figures of the insane or the or the disturbed. The figure the female figure slumped in the arms of a companion seemed to be an image that was particularly redolent for Romney. Here we see this figure across for different drawings. Rather than gain any form of definition or integrity across them. This female figure seems to lose it entirely. And so it's odd. It's odd to that this figure which is actually the most consistent across all of these drawings is also a body divested of its structuring capacities indeed divested of its capacity to be separated from the body that that holds it. In this image in which the prisoners have become the exclusive focus of Romney's imagination. It's very difficult to even solve the kind of outline of this female figure into a body of any kind, legs and arms seeming to drape boneless from the hands of a man who's whose neck seems to be sort of bleeding almost a kind of ink or effort that reflects this kind of intermeshing of the two bodies. The spare linear quality of the ink wash drawings I've been examining his other drawings particularly in his sketchbooks became increasingly agitated and form less in this drawing in in these two drawings Romney has worked and reworked many layers of graphite smudging and erasing to produce figures that can only be properly described as against which the dark and vigorous mark making sort of gathers to delineate the surrounding air. It is almost impossible to distinguish each of the bodies from one another, rather the round spheres of heads, necks, shoulders and arms become a kind of hybridized or composite body in meshed and arriving mass. It was in these kinds of drawings that Romney's efforts to complete a composition for the Howard painting terminated around sometime around 1794 after he had filled in sheet after sheet of ideas. In these later drawings the spare geometrical relations of that early 1780 frontiers piece that I showed you, I showed you before now dissolve into this kind of undifferentiated space of air and of, and of bodies. Such bodies, it would be my suggestion present a kind of shadow to the many groups of perfectly individuated figures it was Romney's business to depict. Take this wonderful painting, for example, a group portrait of the children of Granville and Louisa leaverson gower, perhaps one of Romney's most accomplished portraits, in which the children form a perfect chain interlaced and connected but also independent in and of themselves they move to the sound of a tambourine how the loft like graceful machines for Romney to work out the Howard picture he would have also had perhaps to resolve this great contradiction or relationship between these two kinds of paintings or images I should say. That is how the property rights and claims of the wealthy had reshaped the criminal law of England, forcing people into states of incarceration and criminalizing means of self sustenance. At the margins of society, the individuality of the prisoner their claim to be portrayed might have undermined the grounds of that individuality and self possession that Romney's other portraits aimed at. But perhaps more to the point is the pleasure which Romney took in drawing these bodies that were linked and not separate, not the bounded individuals of his portraits but instead something that formed a kind of indivisible conglomerate, however abject and terrible, it might be. And so perhaps to Romney's drawing show a kind of ambivalence about this kind of separation right that Howard wanted to affect in his reform of of of prisons, one that would you know individuate each prisoner they would be treated as a kind of a single unit would produce them right as these proper subjects of the prison that could undergo internal reformation, but that individuation would in turn break down this kind of delirious chain of bodies. Even though his politics shifted dramatically over the course of the 1790s Romney remain for a time energized by the French Revolution. In October 1792 he wrote that quote the present moment is an epoch to liberty such as has never happened before, since the creation, I confess the sublimity of it has interested it has interested me interested in agitated me so much. If such sentiments would be assiduously excised from his later biographies. It was perhaps because it suggested his belief in the capacities of a collective or colectivity to reform the world in a very different way than figures such as Howard would intend to. It's worth noting that the new new gate prison, the object of earlier for efforts to reform prison was finally completed around 1780 and then promptly burnt to the ground during the Gordon riots of the same year. A different solution to the problem of this individuated body would be found in the system of incarceration and punishment itself. In part due to Howard's efforts this moment saw the advent of many new ideas for criminal punishment with the passing of a law in 1779 to form a national penitentiary. And so penitentiary meaning a jail that in which, which is the punishment right which is a place of reform, rather than just a kind of way station. This, the 1790s also saw the elaboration of Jeremy Bentham's ideas for the panopticon. In the latter image of imprisonment each prisoner is visible to the warden who occupies the center of a circular prison but not to one another a collectivity that is which is invisible to those who form it. In the other model the penitentiary, the reforming prison is reconceived as a zone of a sort of moral improvement itself, and the prisoner becoming a subject that can be molded improved corrected and made to work. This was achieved through many means but most spectacularly in the 19th century to the quote unquote separate system in which prisoners movements were restricted so as to prevent them from ever seeing or communicating with one another. This separation which makes the prisoner into an individual unit is thus also an effacement of identity. And yet as Caroline are Scott has shown in a very brilliant article I recommend everyone read, looking particularly to images published by the 19th century reformer Henry mayhew. These images of dehumanized prisoners themselves seem to offer some kind of aesthetic even erotic thrill. One that seemed to undermine the idea of reform that mayhew was after something of this thrill haunts Romney's drawings to though perhaps in a different fashion. Like his own self image in the group portrait with his friends Romney seem to think that perhaps some measure of one's own identity was better retained by receding into the shadows, then by emerging into pure visibility. And so against the ordered world of elite Georgian society a world in which Romney would never properly fit the extremity of the suffering his drawings captured seems to exist for its own sake, a kind of shadow world of the healthy blooming faces that he painted each day. So much Nick so much to think about. That's fantastic. Do you want to come we're going to occupy these schools here. I think this is the format we've. You're probably aware of my mic is common hitched. I think I can. Am I now switched on as it were. So we can. It's fairly very freewheeling in a sense, because it's not just about asking questions it's about reflecting you give me certainly lots and lots of things think about. So I'm just going to kick off with a few thoughts that came to me when you were talking. I guess I'm Romney are such a difficult figure, because his biography of truths in so many ways himself was a troubled soul throughout his life. He deliberately pulled away from the center, as you said whether it was exhibiting socializing didn't go to dinner with Romney didn't come to you. He didn't really have many friends who are artists one or two but apart from that, and even with his patrons like Haley. We didn't think there was a great deal of love lost. You were not even sure when Haley said oh I've got this fantastic idea. You do this like, you know, et cetera. And I just thinking about these in the in the in terms of his biography about what was going on in his life in that period going into the 1790s. Although he had been always been trouble he he was in a very difficult place in many different ways. Living in Hamster. He had this extraordinary kind of strange managatoir, which we still don't know enough. Probably we shouldn't know more about it. Living in what a gloomy circumstances has been cast collection had an extraordinary collection of classical cast. I mean you could sort of hold this, you know, I'm probably exaggerating, but you know my my mental picture of Romney's world and the erotic. Yeah, and I think this erotic, which I thought you brought out brilliantly, the bodies, the sort of squirming bodies and this kind of my asthma and in this Howard is this kind of strangely spiritual he's almost like Dante visiting hell. He's a shadowy figure. He's a sort of strangely priest like figure. And there's no specific specificity of place or you know you can't link these. And so how much of this is a reflection, or what kind of, you know, variations on a theme of something that was really, because these are troubling drawings in many ways. So, you know, I just sort of teasing out of that kind of. Yeah, no, it's a great question, Martin. You know, it's not, I don't think it's a coincidence right that they're, I mean so hard to date around these drawings, but it seems around the same time he was also, you know, making drawings of hell. He was making drawings of the seven ages of man right so these images of sort of of sort of coming into life and passing away and passing out of life. And absolutely his kind of lifelong depression had only gotten worse and worse in the 1790s so yeah it was it was a very unhappy time and a very strange time and so I think in some ways that too is part of the kind of intensity that he brings to these drawings because clearly it takes you know this project takes on a life that far exceeds any painting that he would have ever made right it served some kind of purpose for him to sort of continue over and over to make these drawings and, but I think, you know, in your right to that there's much more to be thought about this question of. Yeah, what are the drives that this serves in the cast collection to. Yes, because you. Mike to you. Just so. Don't you feel that it's slightly overaking the depression and what we know that at times in his life. The sort of black dog came on a minute affected him quite badly. But by the 1790s he had emerged as the preeminent portrait painter of his day, if only because other people had died Reynolds and Gainsborough left the scene. He was in his own way, the most successful artist in that area. And that rather goes against this idea that he was in some way descending into the blackness of despair. Also, you touched on liberal and questions, which was always a recurring theme with Romney. Right back to the unveiling of Shakespeare, the infant Shakespeare. The same images of despair and fury and they're there and that's many, many years earlier. So they weren't sort of emerging same things in the 1790s. They were recurring. He was developing in different ways. Absolutely. No, the question of of the passions and of the kind of. Yeah, the exploration of these of the kind of plasticity of the face right and what the face can do that's something that he's doing mostly in his drawings but also in his in his paintings throughout his life. Thank you very much. Mark at the back. Yeah. I've got a question that he's obviously been watching and enjoying your talk, Nick. So he asks what does Nick think of the idea that Romney did not seriously contemplate a painting of Howard 500 drawings and not even a single oil sketch let alone anything more finished. It appeared when he did complete subject painters in oils of Milton and Newton. Mid summer nights dream so sense that these are drawings which may not have ever really been imagined as ones resulting in the paintings Alex's suggestion, or what do you make of that. Well, thank you for that question. I'm intimidated and to be speaking to that. I think it's probably correct. I mean, it seems that if he ever probably intended to make a painting he gave up on that pretty fast. And yet I'm not sure. I just I wonder then why he would continually repeat that motif. You know there, it was still a subject right it was still an image that had a hold on him so whether or not that image was meant to become a painting. That's the question and and it makes me think back to those, you know, large drawings from the 1770s right these cartoons that I showed you that are enormous. They ostensibly to were meant to be made into paintings but in a way, they're finished almost as if they were, they were works intended almost to be exhibited and I guess my answer to that question is, I don't know what I think about but I think it could, could absolutely be the case that he sort of he sort of realized it was this impossible project or one that he could only work through in this private space. I'm asking, there wasn't a patrons who are saying, I want this picture, and that's the difference whether it's Boydell or somebody else. If somebody's putting money on the table and they're commissioning you and they're saying, okay. So when Boydell does come on the table everybody has a go because whether they're useless or good that they want to do it. So I think this was something that was going on as a kind of like motif in his life at the time. To ask whether it was going to be finished, did he finish it, was maybe not what it's the driver there. It's sort of like, not why didn't he finish it but why did he keep working on it. You know that he was fixated on people like Lady Hamilton and he would just keep on repeating and repeating and perhaps that could be an explanation. He was a great non finisher as well. At least he took his time, as we know with portrait very fast, quick of the blocks, but he didn't always get the commission. I've got another quite long question or a set of observations from David Sulkin. He asks, this is his comment, I'll just read it out. I'm surprised that you had so little to say about Romney's depiction of the bodies of prisoners and of male prisoners in particular. Surely one of the most striking features of these images, especially the studies in pen and wash, is that heroic idealized character that Romney has given to the naked bodies of his imprisoned men. It seems to me that this creates at least two obvious problems, one for Howard and one for the prisoners themselves. Surely the problem for Howard in the context of the conventions of history painting is that juxtaposition of his figure with these powerful male nudes makes him look decidedly non heroic. In this sense, less significant than his oppressed social inferiors. The prisoners themselves, the problem is that heroic bodies are not meant to inspire his sympathy, but admiration or even emulation. It's as though the way Romney has approached the problem of representing Howard contains the seeds of its own impossibility. Can I ask for your thoughts on this? I think it's a marvelous suggestion and it's a very important one too because I think. Yes, there's the kind of erotics of the kind of distended body but then there's also this kind of these. I mean maybe we can go back to one of them, just so that we have one on the screen. But I think this question of that kind of intensely rendered male body. And even this sort of repeat, I guess I focused on the slumping woman, but also the kind of the male figure holding that woman up has something to do with this problem of power and so I do think that that really interesting observation has much to do with this. The problem of where Howard sits in the picture right because what is what gesture is is sort of commensurate. He, he himself by refusing to submit himself to be painted as a portrait he he also refused to take on any kind of any kind of public or sort of heroic stand. Yes, I think in a way. You could say that that is one of the seeds of the kind of impossibility of the picture is that the kind of language of hero heroism at least as it's invested in male bodies was sort of completely scrambled at least in in Romney's imagination but thank I thank him for that very very perceptive comment. As a microphone whizzing down. Do we know how much time Romney actually spent in a prison, because I suppose another aspect of Tolkien's sort of comment on that is that is this actually at least the problem also that there's a social reality that he's gesturing towards but actually what he's engaging with is a purely artistic sort of question artistic ideal, and that again is the same sort of dichotomy that you've got there. That's a great question. And I think that also points to this interesting sort of cleavage between, let's say, Howard's project and Romney's project because again, Howard's, Howard's work and the kind of force that exerted was all about his presence there. And his kind of heroism was related to his martyrdom in the sense that he died 1790 after contracting disease in now modern day Ukraine, as we were talking about before. And so, you know, Howard, the reason Howard had authority was the fact that he not only had been there once but he had been to every single prison and and could attest to that. Whereas, yes, Romney's is a complete work of the imagination and so maybe it's also this space of sort of projections about these problems of sort of class and authority and the figure. So that's a really interesting suggestion. And this point about, of course, when I was scribbling my notes, I mean, I was thinking about the fact that they already lost souls is very different from the Howard, you know, he's about how do you improve? How do you get the system to work? It's a progressive kind of idea whereas in these, they're all they're all ready. And this is, this is very Michelangeles, it is heroic. That's where you see male, male figures riding together because they're already in hell. In that sense. But I mean, your suggested reading was about Romney's drawing on the ground tour and his and the strong vein of classicism in it, which was driving it, his collection of classical cast and it was not an accident. So these were not drawing aids. Yeah, and the fact that he surrounded them. He didn't run an academy. This is very different. He was inviting people around to, you know, or giving some tuition. It was very much part of his mental world. I'm not saying that pejoratively, but it was very much important. Mark. I've got a question, Nick. I wonder if you can just turn to some of the pencil drawings. Yeah. I mean, when I see these in a kind of technical way, they are the kind of drawings that artists produce when they're thinking about Keras Gura. That is the play of light and shade and darkness and light across an image. It's a way of exploring the language of light and shade across an image. And they're really, and whenever you see 18th century artists doing this, it's always fascinating because for them, light and shade is a language and it can articulate and enforce or reinforce narratives within the image very, very powerfully. So on the one hand is a depiction of the individual bodies and the figural relationships, which you are interested in looking at these in. But how do you read their language of light and shade and they're changing language of shade over the sequence of drawings that you looked at of this kind because they are exercises or explorations and essays in different forms of Keras Gura. Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I mean, I think right and the sequence is a bit imagined right because it's hard to know which ones were made earlier but I think in in the kind of ink wash ones right where he's giving us this very sort of defined architecture right where the kind of shadow is really about sort of bringing something into relief right and here I think the kind of sculpture gallery that he would view in darkness is is important. And so, in a way what I see almost the kind of is almost an advancing forward in the picture but also forward in prominence of sort of shade in which it kind of overtakes the figures as the kind of primary subject and so I think, you know when you look at them. In person, some of them. This one in particular, it's kind of. It's, it's kind of not shocking but it's quite striking how many layers of graphite there are here and he's really, really going into the paper. So not only is that a kind of measure of the sort of the sort of gestural for, but I think it's almost the sense in which that the sort of the shade of Keras Gura but say or the kind of negatives. Positive relationship kind of becomes reversed in this potentially destabilizing way I think you see that particularly in the kind of left hand part of the image. I think, you know, in a way right. What's interesting is that the most kind of forceful or gestural language of chat of of this drawing right is not invested in the figure and and informing it that line, but rather in invest is invested in in this kind of atmosphere, right that he's trying to produce and to kind of invest with a kind of force. Thank you that was great. Yeah so just regarding his revolutionary enthusiasm through this through this period so he goes to Paris in August 1790, and you know it's one month after the Festival of Federation first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. All the rhetoric is about light in the darkness, it's about liberation and reform. In October 1792, he's talking about the sublimity of revolution and instill approving terms, which is one month after the September massacres where the prisoners of Paris is slaughtered on mass and Paris is Paris is prisons. The dominant imagery is that of a pilot of corpses. So, you know, there's some way in which, you know, something inability to reconcile those two things is part of the impossibility of the images as well but they still maintains this revolutionary enthusiasm. Thank you Richard that's really interesting and helpful and I do think. In the, in the kind of trying to track Romney's sort of political sympathies that comment has always stood out as a kind of odd one because it kind of comes after most of the other enthusiasts of the Revolution and Britain had said okay never mind. And so what was he, you know what was he responding to and so I think that idea of this kind of contradiction on the one hand of of his own kind of fascination with sort of a completely imaginary form of death, right of of kind of the body and pain versus this actual very extreme version. I think that could be part of the problem but I think it's also, I guess what I was trying to also suggest that the end was that. Not that that massacre was, you know, demonstration of the power of the people, but I think there was still in him this sort of belief in that kind of entangled subjectivity, right. That had something to do with the French Revolution and maybe something to do with his fascination the subject, even if it becomes completely contradictory at a historical level but I'll have to ask you more. Do we know what run we thought about David sort of political positions because that is very different he is not just drawing it he's there he's part of it he is self politician. No, I mean he says almost nothing about his trip, his letters he was not a great. At least that I know maybe others know, know better but as far as, as far as I know, he doesn't actually write much down about his response to his trip to parent just picking up on that. He, one of his friends from France was Madame de Gennair. He visited her right at the beginning of the revolution and she eventually fled from the revolution and stayed in London and Romney knew her quite well. So he was obviously by the early 1790s getting some quite detailed first hand knowledge of what had happened in France. Remembering we wouldn't have 24 hour news in those days. And so people must have been very dependent on the one or two sources that they were able to rely on. Knowing that Romney had this sort of slightly depressive manic depressive tendencies. It seems to me anyway not unreasonable to assume that the way in which the revolution developed and the way in which it went off the rails as it were in terms of the great hopes that people had for it at the beginning towards the absolute despair that it created for many people towards the end. The effect on Romney I would have thought would have been very, very depressing. And if this project had some way become locked in with what was happening in France with his responses to it, I don't find it that surprising that it ran out of steam. It was also getting very busy. He had a lot of this accursed portrait painting. And so it looks as though it just lost emphasis for him. But it was set against this problem of the political background and the disillusionment that he obviously ultimate felt with the French Revolution. Yeah, I think that's a good way of framing absolutely. Thank you. I'm very hesitant, because I'm not an art expert, but I was wondering if Romney's prison scenes could also have responded to things like Burke's speech in the Commons in I think 1792, where he called up James, the young James, James Rock Jr. And Thomas Cooper for their address to the Jacobine Club and the subsequent treason trials and threats of treason trials, which usually ended in crudels in England, because it was anybody of a radical frame of mind a very frightening time when it did seem as though certain British radicals who had expressed revolutionary sympathies were in danger of being executed. And certainly when you think of things like the King and Church riots, the pro-King and Church riots of 1791 across Britain, the position of people supporting the revolution was not very secure. And I wonder if some of that might have been expressed in the prison scenes. That's a great question. Thank you for asking it. I mean, I think it, yeah, it's quite interesting how, despite his kind of, I mean, he was said, it was said that his house was one of the few that Thomas Paine was saying. Romney had this kind of close association with people who were in, who were exposed to this real crackdown. And so absolutely, I think he would have known what dangers were involved in that. On the other hand, you know, it's interesting that, you know, as much as maybe this, this sort of project might have been tied in with some kind of revolutionary or at least, you know, different political sensibilities, you know, Howard was absolutely an established figure. He was the person who was meant to run the new state run penitentiary. So he was, you know, to represent Howard and to represent him as a kind of salvific force that would have been seen as absolutely sort of enmeshed with some idea of the aspirations of the British state. And so I think the problem then is what that kind of representation had to do with his other kind of fascination with this tangle, but it's, it's a really good question and one I should, I'll need to think about more. No, yes, the back will come to. I've got a question from Janet Colott, who's asking, I wondered if, like the links you made with Atlantic enslavement in particular Wedgewood's kneeling shackle black man, Romney may have gained inspiration from images of incarcerated madness that is he drawing on a kind of an imagery of incarcerated madness that existed in in the period. Janet Colott is asking. It's a very good question. And this one of the other kind of, I'm not sure it's in any of the drawings that I put in my PowerPoint, but one of the other kind of stock figures is this kind of figure of the insane, or of someone in a kind of state of mental extremity. So, yes, I think absolutely there's there's also a kind of visual culture or visual language of madness that he's that he's drawing on and that, you know, similar to similar to sort of a later painter like Jerry co would also be very interested in sort of isolating the pictures of being out of one's mind or being insensible. Yeah, good question. My background is completely non artistic. And I never heard of John Romney's with my colleague, but I did in my work work for very rich people. And the fact that he has 400 car too, I just wonder sometimes when you put the phone down and some people kick, you know, the waste paper, the basket, some people put on tape that we like to send and wipe it off. And I just want to find, get the pub and having a stiff drink. And I just wonder whether Romney did these just to calm himself down. This is what life is really about. Not always rich people that I have my living by. And this is his way of, as it were calming down. I think that's very interesting, a sort of therapeutic, the therapeutic value of sketching a tangle of sort of abject bodies and one that maybe should be, you know, recommended. But it's a serious point, isn't it? No, I don't. Yeah. No, I know. I'm not tall, but it's a serious point because history painting, as we know, was not for most people a way of making a living in the late 18th century. The exception was in the West because the kings paid to pay lots of money for them. But otherwise, portraiture was the main bread and butter and it was the very few portrait painters who don't say it is drudgery. Gainsborough says it. Reynolds probably would say it if he wasn't so diplomatic. Right of Derby, who's a very good kind of interesting comparison with Romney and Reynolds himself. He did. He painted them in his free time because the people with their down faces in and out. So it is a way of liberating your imagination. And that kind of mechanism. And this is not, you know, when looking at those, the pencil drawings are very unusual. This is not disenio. You know, it's this big kind of overworked. And they're not all this. And they're not pretty, are they? I mean, they tend to be, you know, I remember seeing a load of them in this exhibition in Paris years ago called Dutremont, where they remember they had that in, it was supposed to show up British art to the French. So it was a huge room of Romney drawings. I was like, oh my God. You know, nothing wrong in a sense, but it's not typical. And these aren't typical. But I think, yeah, sorry. Can I ask a question, Nick, which is a strange one, but I wonder if we've been talking about the way in which he does all this work and then fails to produce a kind of a final coherent painting. And I wonder if you find, having looked at all, I get this feeling from what your own work with this imagery that you find it quite frustrating that whereas we normally expect to have when we produce a piece of art, do a piece of art historical research, do our research, and come up with our paper and come up with our argument. We have a very clear sense of an argument that emerges, but I get a feeling here that you're still kind of grappling with this material and still finding it quite hard to come up with a coherent reading. And maybe it's interesting to think about whether this can defeat our classic art historical projects of coherent readings. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one of the best sources on these is a really interesting dissertation from 1983 by Victor Chang. And he I think was also similarly plagued by a kind of difficulty of dealing with the works and and made these really fascinating diagrams actually of the works in order to kind of contain them and he said here are the seven typologies of these drawings and here's how these work in this set of drawings and here's how these work in those and I think even that impulse to kind of diagram is is also a kind of response to the kind of problem of what to make up of these drawings because I absolutely. I think your, your suggestion is absolutely correct is that I sort of hoped I would sort of figure out what he was trying to do. I didn't think that I have. And instead I got more interested in trying to figure out why he kept doing it right more the kind of the process unless the kind of intention or the kind of aim that might have in the end served a sort of purpose outside of it. I think what what you do with when you're sort of confronted with this kind of massive often also quite repetitive images right many of them are quite similar to one another. And that kind of repetition itself is a kind of exciting but kind of frustrating object of study. To make a chart with numbers. Say by. How it was a national figure. And in 1795 aware about his money is in St Paul's Cathedral Reynolds Johnson, William Jones. I was looking at the in anticipation thought today, particularly at the statue Howard stepping himself out of chains remarkable. And I could have freed heroic figures stepping out of chains. Reynolds is the only one this goes on. But that was completed later on. But, you know, it's interesting to set that against wrong private obsesional request. They are remarkable. They are quite like them. That's the thing that's why they are worthy of our time and your time. Even if you can't diagramatise them or put them all in order on the floor and figure it all out because I mean the thing again is an extraordinary artist. Very fertile imagine. And it's sort of, I went on to the beginning about, you know, living in the bleeding house in Amsterdam, but in a sense there was this extraordinary mind, tackling extraordinary problems. And sometimes that's what it's about. Yeah, yeah. It's getting to the witching hours and half seven anymore. One last thought before we sort of get more informal. So I think as it's 730. We can thank Nick once more for a fascinating. So if you'd like to stay for a chat and a drink you're most welcome but let me before I release you just say next Thursday evening's lecture. Following on from nightmares and incarceration addresses the topic of shark attack. Well, there will be talking about John Singleton copies Watson and the shark and taste for flesh taste for flesh next Thursday at 6pm. Join us. Thank you so much for everyone, both here in the room and beyond. Thank you. Thank you.