Mrs. Billington (1765/1768-1818) as Saint Cecilia

Elizabeth Billington was about 20 when Romney painted her, and already famous. A London soprano trained by her father, she had married the double bass player John Billington in 1783, and the museum calls her the ablest singer of her day and the richest professional woman in Europe. Her private life was the talk of the town as well.

Romney shows her as Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, seated at a keyboard in a white dress with a pink sash, one hand raised, a sheet of music before her. The role was probably her own idea. Yet she seems never to have come for the picture. In the following year she asked Joshua Reynolds, the most powerful painter in London, for the same subject, which suggests she did not care for Romney's version.

So the canvas stayed in the painter's family. After his death in 1802 it went to his son John, failed to sell at Christie's in 1807, and remained with Romney's granddaughter into the 1890s. In 1896 Clara Bertram Kimball of Boston bought it from the dealers Knoedler.