A head study of Emma Hart (née Amy Lyon, later Lady Hamilton, 1765–1815) as Miranda from Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’. Facing slightly to left, Emma turns both her head and her gaze upwards, her lips parted. Her wavy auburn hair is suggested with a series of fluid, painterly brushstrokes, which dissolve into the painting’s brown ground layer. Emma’s expression communicates distress, uncertainty and entreaty, alluding to the moment in ‘The Tempest’ (Act I, Scene 2) when Miranda begs her father Prospero to use his powers of sorcery to rescue the crew of a passing ship from a violent storm that he had magically conjured.

The daughter of a Cheshire blacksmith, Emma Hart (born Amy Lyon) became famous as a gifted performer and beautiful model. After working for a time in domestic service, she became mistress to Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, who dismissed her after she fell pregnant in 1781. She appealed for help to the Hon. Charles Francis Greville – a prominent figure in cultural and aristocratic circles whom she had met while living with Fetherstonhaugh. In response to her plea, 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”, to which Greville added the new surname “Hart”.

Greville introduced Emma to his friends in the art world, including the portrait painter George Romney, with whom she developed a mutually beneficial creative relationship. 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. 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 and impressed his clients with virtuoso displays of rapid painting. By 1780, Romney's portraits were, according to Horace Walpole, “in great vogue” and he worked in an increasingly neo-classical style.

Emma posed many times, adopting countless different guises for a range of ‘fancy’ pictures which are remarkable for their breadth, ambition and diversity. 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 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 indulge his creative fascination with classical aesthetics and emotional expression to a greater extent than he was able to do in his society portraits.

Romney’s paintings of Emma can be divided into four broad categories: society portraits (where Emma appears in fashionable contemporary clothing), ‘in character’ representations (where Emma assumes a particular persona), history or genre paintings, and finally rapid sketches, like the present example. Some of these sketches were preparatory to larger pictures; others were produced purely as studies, inviting admiration for their spontaneity and fluid brushwork.

Emma posed for Romney as various Shakespearean heroines. Miranda seems to have been a particular favourite of the artist. He painted several studies involving this character, for which Emma either acted as model or at least served as inspiration.

The present painting dates from the final years of the creative partnership between Emma and Romney. It appears to have been painted in early 1786, shortly before Emma was sent to live with Greville’s uncle, Sir William Hamilton, who was the British Ambassador at the Court of Naples. A noted scholar and collector of classical antiquities, Hamilton had been seeking a beautiful and charming hostess for his salon since the death of his wife. With her warm and extravagant personality, Emma proved ideally suited to this role and embraced the opportunity her situation afforded to further her education. She also turned the performative talents that she had honed in Romney’s studio to a new purpose, developing a series of dramatic poses based on classical history and mythology, known as her “Attitudes”, which she performed to immense acclaim from Sir William’s friends and fellow connoisseurs. Eventually, Emma achieved a respectable social position through her marriage to Sir William in 1791. As Lady Hamilton, she became an intimate of Queen Maria-Carolina, before entering into a passionate affair with the British naval commander Horatio Nelson after the Battle of the Nile in 1798. From then until Hamilton's death in 1803, their almost inseparable ‘ménage à trois’ was sustained by Sir William's urbane refusal to acknowledge the real nature of his wife's relationship with their ‘dear friend’ Nelson. In 1801, shortly after they all returned together to England, Emma gave birth in secret to Nelson's daughter, Horatia, around whom they wove an elaborate charade that the child was in fact Nelson's adopted god-daughter. Emma's grief at Nelson's death at Trafalgar in 1805 was inconsolable. Denied the living that Nelson had bequeathed to her, she ran into debt, for which she was briefly imprisoned, and died in straitened circumstances in Calais in 1815.