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Lot Essay
In the second half of the 1770s, recently returned from his Grand Tour, Romney took time from his increasingly busy portrait practice to explore themes from classical literature. Potential subjects for history paintings were suggested to him by friends and even clients. Robert Potter, a Norfolk rector who sat to Romney for his portrait in 1778, had recently achieved celebrity by publishing his own translation of the plays of Aeschylus, and undoubtedly directed the artist to the dramatic episodes from Aeschylus’s The Persians of which this vibrant sketch is a conflation.
In Prometheus Bound, as its translator Robert Potter noted, Aeschylus ‘exerted the strength and ardour of his genius with a wild and terrible magnificence’. The scene depicted by Romney comes from the start of the play, when Zeus’s minions Bia (Force) and Kratos (Strength), assisted by the god Hephaestus, bind the rebel Titan Prometheus to a rock as punishment for giving fire to humans. Hephaestus feels pity for Prometheus, whose fate will be to have his liver eaten daily by an eagle; but Bia and Kratos are symbols of blind obedience to authority. Prometheus himself has often been identified as the mythic embodiment of rebellion: a heroic figure in the age of revolution.
As with his concurrent depiction of The Dream of Atossa (lot 93), Romney sketched the subject in ink in conjunction with making a large black chalk cartoon (Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, fig. 1). Even making allowance for the fact that the Prometheus cartoon has long been in very poor condition and is substantially restored, comparison between it and this drawing is much in the latter’s favour. Gone is the tentative quality of the figure drawing in chalk and the blank, unfocussed background: instead, working in his classic medium of ink and wash, Romney charges the figures with a spontaneous and emotive energy, certain in his command of line. Whirls of wash establish the stormy, doom-laden atmosphere while throwing the silhouetted figures into sharp relief. The sense that this drawing prepares for a painting is distant; in capturing the remote, stark beauty of its literary source it is perfect in its means.
We are grateful to Alex Kidson for preparing this catalogue entry.
In Prometheus Bound, as its translator Robert Potter noted, Aeschylus ‘exerted the strength and ardour of his genius with a wild and terrible magnificence’. The scene depicted by Romney comes from the start of the play, when Zeus’s minions Bia (Force) and Kratos (Strength), assisted by the god Hephaestus, bind the rebel Titan Prometheus to a rock as punishment for giving fire to humans. Hephaestus feels pity for Prometheus, whose fate will be to have his liver eaten daily by an eagle; but Bia and Kratos are symbols of blind obedience to authority. Prometheus himself has often been identified as the mythic embodiment of rebellion: a heroic figure in the age of revolution.
As with his concurrent depiction of The Dream of Atossa (lot 93), Romney sketched the subject in ink in conjunction with making a large black chalk cartoon (Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, fig. 1). Even making allowance for the fact that the Prometheus cartoon has long been in very poor condition and is substantially restored, comparison between it and this drawing is much in the latter’s favour. Gone is the tentative quality of the figure drawing in chalk and the blank, unfocussed background: instead, working in his classic medium of ink and wash, Romney charges the figures with a spontaneous and emotive energy, certain in his command of line. Whirls of wash establish the stormy, doom-laden atmosphere while throwing the silhouetted figures into sharp relief. The sense that this drawing prepares for a painting is distant; in capturing the remote, stark beauty of its literary source it is perfect in its means.
We are grateful to Alex Kidson for preparing this catalogue entry.