George Romney

George Romney was, for a stretch of the 1780s, the most sought-after portrait painter in London, a rival to Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough for the city's fashionable sitters. He had left his wife and children behind in the north of England to build the career, seeing them rarely across four decades.

The great fixation of his life arrived in 1782: a young woman named Emma Hart, beautiful, poor and not yet 20. Romney painted her over and over, as a spinner, a bacchante, a saint, a figure from myth, more than 50 times across the following years. She would become Lady Hamilton and the mistress of Admiral Nelson, but for Romney she was above all a face he could not stop painting. His health and mind failed in the 1790s. He finally went back north to his wife, who nursed him until his death in 1802.