A half-length portrait of Charles Francis Greville, 1749–1809, in a brown coat and white necktie, facing to left. The second son of Francis Greville, 1st Earl of Warwick, the sitter was a key figure in cultural and aristocratic circles in London at the end of the eighteenth century. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1772 and inherited his father’s seat in the House of Commons the following year. He later served as a member of the Board of Trade in 1774–1780, as one of the Lords of the Admiralty in 1780–1782 and as vice-chamberlain of the Royal Household in 1794–1809. Living off an income of £500 a year, which was generated from landowning and investments, he developed a passion for collecting minerals, plants, works of art and classical antiquities. He was an important patron of both science and the arts. In particular, he enjoyed a longstanding relationship with the artist George Romney (1734–1802), who painted the present portrait.

Romney was an important portrait painter of the late eighteenth century, generally ranked alongside Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough at the top of his profession. The Cumbrian-born artist travelled to Paris in 1764 and lived between 1772 and 1775 in Italy, where he became interested in history painting and classical aesthetics, including the idea of improving upon nature and the pursuit of perfect form. His best work demonstrated imagination, sensitivity and elegance, although his routine portraits could be repetitive and monotonous. As a society portraitist in London, he was exceptionally prolific. Undertaking a vast number of commissions, he relied heavily upon stylised pictorial formulas. By 1780, Romney's portraits were, according to Horace Walpole, “in great vogue” and he worked in an increasingly neo-classical style.

Romney first encountered the Greville family in 1768 and they became his first aristocratic patrons. The present portrait seems to have been executed in the 1780s, although the precise date is uncertain. There are sittings recorded in Romney's diaries for “Grenville [sic]” on 22 June 1781 and 30 March and 22 April 1782. Further sittings are recorded under “Greville” on 27 November and 4 December 1781 and 16 April and 15 May 1782, as well as others for “Mr Greville” on 23 April, 2 and 15 May, and 22 June 1787. It is unclear how many of these entries refer to the present portrait.

It was also in the 1780s that Amy Lyon (later Emma Hart and ultimately Lady Hamilton) entered the lives of both Greville and Romney. Greville first met Lyon – a famously sensual beauty from a humble provincial background – when she was living as Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh’s mistress at Uppark House in Sussex. After becoming pregnant in 1781, she was dismissed by Fetherstonhaugh and appealed to Greville for help. In response, Greville brought her to London, sent away her new-born daughter and offered her the prospect of a new life, suggesting that she “take another name, by degrees I would get you a new set of acquaintance”. Around this time, she began styling herself “Emma” and Greville gave her the new surname “Hart”. She lived with him in Paddington Green, Middlesex, until – anxious to secure a wealthy wife for himself (a search which would prove unsuccessful) – he sent her in 1786 to stay with his widowed uncle Sir William Hamilton, who was at that time the British ambassador in Naples.

While living with Greville, Emma became a regular fixture in Romney’s studio. Greville first took her to sit for the artist in April 1782, in order both to occupy her time with a respectable activity and to broader her understanding of art and culture. She was sixteen years old at the time. The following year, both he and his uncle Sir William Hamilton commissioned portraits of her from Romney. This marked the start of a long-term and mutually beneficial creative relationship between Romney and Emma. She posed for him again and again, adopting countless different guises for a range of imaginative ‘fancy’ pictures. Although on one level these pictures presented Emma as an object to be gazed at and consumed, they also allowed her to hone her considerable talent for theatrical performance, a skill which she used to carve out a place for herself in high society. For Romney, meanwhile, painting Emma afforded an opportunity to depart from his regular portraiture and to explore classical ideals of beauty.

In contrast to the imagination that Romney displayed in Emma’s portraits, the present painting demonstrates his facility for producing more restrained and conventional compositions. The portrait conforms to a standard half-length format for male portraiture. There are no props to suggest the sitter’s interests, his brown coat blending into the dark background to create an austere, pared-back image. Illuminated from the side, Greville’s face becomes the sole focus of the image, his distant gaze and parted lips imbuing the portrait with a sense of psychological depth.