James Farrer

James Farrer was an early sitter for George Romney, painted in 1770 when the artist was still relatively new to London and building the practice that would make him famous. This work, now at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, predates Romney's Italian journey of 1773–75, which would transform his approach and elevate his ambitions. The early date makes it historically significant: portraits from before Romney's Italian period are rarer and less frequently discussed than the celebrated commissions of the 1780s. Farrer was a member of the northern English professional class from which Romney himself came — a world of lawyers, merchants, and local gentry whose patronage supported regional English painters before they made the move to London. The portrait has the careful, slightly formal quality of Romney's pre-Italian work, not yet showing the looser, more expressive handling he would develop after studying the masters in Rome and Naples.

The 1770 canvas shows a Romney whose technique is competent but has not yet undergone the transformation of the Italian years. The handling is more careful and less fluid than his mature work, with a certain tightness in the paint surface that the later years would shed. The face is observed with honest directness, the composition straightforward in its professional portrait conventions.