William Tighe (1766–1816)

William Tighe was a young Irish gentleman of twenty-one when George Romney painted him in 1787, at Eton during or around the conclusion of his schooling. Tighe belonged to the Anglo-Irish landowning class — his family held Woodstock House in County Wicklow — and was educated in England before returning to Ireland, where he would spend his adult life. The portrait, now at Eton College, belongs to Romney's large series of Etonian likenesses from the 1780s. Tighe is also remembered as the husband of Mary Tighe, the Irish poet best known for her poem Psyche, published in 1805 — a work that would influence Keats among others. William himself was less distinguished than his wife, but his portrait at Eton documents the world of Anglo-Irish Protestant gentry that formed a distinctive element of late Georgian society.

Romney's 1787 handling is fully mature — the fluent, confident brushwork of his peak years applied to a youthful male subject. The face of the twenty-one-year-old is rendered with the particular care Romney gave to faces while the coat and background are managed economically. The warm, clear palette suits a composition about youth and promise.