ALEXANDRIA VA.- A remarkable George Romney painting that disappeared from view for more than half a century is returning to the auction block this month. John Henderson in the Role of Macbeth, painted around 1785, will be offered as Lot 3032 in The Potomack Company’s English, European & American Fine Art auction on September 24, 2026. The work has been rediscovered after 51 years and, according to the catalog research, can now be connected to one of Romney’s most ambitious theatrical portraits.

The painting depicts celebrated 18th-century actor John Henderson in one of his signature Shakespearean roles. Henderson established his reputation through performances of Hamlet, Macbeth and other tragic characters before making his London debut in 1777 and later emerging as one of the capital’s leading male actors. Romney knew Henderson socially through the exclusive Unincreasibles Club, where the artist was the group’s only painter, and the portrait appears to have grown out of that circle of friendship, theater and artistic patronage.

What survives today, however, tells only part of the painting’s extraordinary story. Research suggests that the canvas was originally considerably larger and included Banquo and the three witches from Macbeth. By the early 20th century, the right side had apparently been cut away and Banquo painted over, transforming a dramatic theatrical composition into what appeared to be a conventional portrait. Evidence uncovered in the canvas, together with its provenance and comparison with an early engraving, has helped identify the work as the long-lost original—a painting described in the catalog as an important surviving fragment of 18th-century British theatrical history.

Catalogue Note:

The actor John Henderson was born in London in 1747. He had determined on a career as an actor by the late 1760s, and by 1770 he was also giving public recitations, a clue to his style of acting, in which sensitivity to the meaning of the words prevailed over more physical or emotive attributes of performance. Despite his defects as an actor – he was short and fat, and did not have a powerful voice or stage presence – Henderson compelled immediate admiration for the intelligence of his textual understanding and roleplay. He also had a prodigious memory, and could play five different parts in the space of a week.

Henderson’s first supporters recommended him to David Garrick, London’s unchallenged theatrical supremo as actor and increasingly, impresario. Garrick, sensing a plausible and unwanted rival, froze him out, and Henderson began his career in 1772 in Bath. He introduced himself playing a series of tragic Shakespearean characters, initially Hamlet but within days Macbeth too. The Scottish king was to become one of his signature roles, and although Garrick continued to be sniffy about his talents, others recognised his qualities more readily. He finally made his debut in London in the summer of 1777.

Henderson was a bon viveur, and as early as 1768 a member of a London literary and social club called the Shandean Society, named for the anti-hero of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It is possible Romney, who had met Sterne as a young man and painted several scenes from Sterne’s novel, already knew Henderson at this time, but as the Shandean Society morphed into a club called The Unincreasibles – a reference to its restricted membership of eight – Romney and Henderson emerged as two of its core members. Romney was the only painter in the club, just as his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds was the only painter in the better-known ‘Club’ of Doctor Johnson.

Although very little is known about the inception of Romney’s painting of Henderson as Macbeth, it is tempting to assume that the idea for it sprang from within the Unincreasibles Club. One thing that is certain is that when the painting was eventually finished, it was raffled within the club and won by the surgeon William Long (in whose family it was to descend for the next hundred years). But whether a raffle was the intention all along is unclear, just as it is uncertain whether the only recorded sittings – five in all – that Henderson gave to Romney, in the autumn of 1780, were unquestionably for this project. At around the same time Romney also studied Henderson in the role of Falstaff, arguably in a more realistic, less flattering manner, to judge from drawings in the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge and the Yale Center for British Art (fig. 1). Nevertheless, in the previous year of 1779 Henderson had finally won a major contract to play at Covent Garden theatre, the rival to Garrick’s Drury Lane; he had chosen to make his debut that season playing Macbeth; while Garrick himself had died that January, freeing Henderson to become the leading male actor in London.

In this context, it seems most probable that Romney’s portrait of Henderson, blatantly physically flattered as he is here, was conceived as a publicity venture, in the same way that Garrick, at the outset of his career nearly forty years earlier, had been puffed by Hogarth in the portrait of him playing the portentous tent scene in Act V of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Although on a heroic scale, Hogarth’s painting was less familiar – it disappeared almost immediately into a little-known private collection – than the celebrated engraving of it by Charles Grignion which sealed the actor’s celebrity (fig. 2). Equally, Romney’s painting, once completed, was immediately engraved by John Jones (fig. 3). The parallels between the two pictures must have been obvious to contemporaries and were surely contrived: both were on a large scale – the artists pushing the boundaries between theatrical portraiture and history painting (and Romney experimenting with an unfamiliar thick and impasted, Old Masterly, painting technique appropriate for the occasion) ; they both depicted doomed Shakespearean kings; and neither entered the actor’s collection but were painted with engraving – popularisation – in mind. It was as though, after Garrick’s death, Henderson could now aim to steal some of his thunder.

Unfortunately, but typically, Romney left his painting unfinished until after Henderson’s sudden death in November 1785. It seems that the chief reason for this was that he had not found suitable models to sit for the three witches which were to occupy the right-hand side of the picture; that is, until shortly before the actor’s death when, attending one of Henderson’s recitations organised by Thomas Sheridan at the Freemason’s Hall, Romney spotted a man in the audience scowling witch-like at Sheridan, and drew him covertly on the spot. With this impetus, Romney did complete the painting in the months after the actor died. That the work duly enjoyed some early celebrity, and bid fair to register with contemporaries as one of Romney’s most significant masterpieces, is attested by the fact that at least two early copies were made, one of them painted over Jones’s engraving; as well as at least one version depicting the figure of Henderson alone, which appeared in Romney’s studio sale, and may have been a preparatory study for the large painting. This spawned its own engravings early in the nineteenth century.

The existence of these copies, variants and prints, combined with the fact that the original was lost sight of for decades and when it did emerge, twice aroused no interest in the saleroom, may have served as the justification for what followed. In 1897 the work was shown at the Grafton Gallery’s Exhibition of Dramatic and Musical Art titled as showing Macbeth with the witches, and this was the last certain, documented sighting of it at its original dimensions of 53 x 64 inches. There is powerful circumstantial evidence to confirm that the present canvas, re-identified after 129 years, is that same work.

Firstly, assuming the whole of the right-hand side of the picture has been cut off (to bring it to the size of a standard 18th-century half-length portrait, circa 50 x 40 inches) the act of trimming has preserved insignificant scraps of cloud and landscape along the right-hand edge which are seen in Jones’s engraving, but which would hardly have been painted into a simple portrait of Henderson. Secondly, the figure of Banquo, who appeared next to Macbeth in Romney’s original has been found, covered by overpaint, on the painting’s left-hand side. Thirdly, there are stylistic considerations: the rich and Old Masterly handling of paint quite out of keeping with the scenario that this is simply one more hitherto unrecorded copy. Fourthly, it is possible to trace the provenance of the present work, at its current dimensions, back to 1901, only four years after its appearance at the Grafton Galleries’ exhibition of 1897.

In 1901 the painting was included in a sale at Christie’s: a printed label 102 on the reverse of the present stretcher is the lot number in that sale. The vendor, a Miss M. A. Nicholson, had lent the painting to an exhibition of Romney’s work, also at the Grafton Galleries, the previous autumn, and in both cases, the work was now titled as simply a portrait of the actor John Henderson (no mention of witches). In the 1900 exhibition catalogue no size was given, but in 1901 Christie’s sale catalogue gives the dimensions as 30 x 25 inches. This error, which has spawned a century of art-historical confusion, may have been a simple mistake, but cumulatively it reads as the product of advice, sadly typical of the ‘financial advisers’ of the age, over how to make the portrait more sellable. Cut off the witches, paint out Banquo, elements which had evidently disturbed the taste of the age, show the portrait as demonstrably different from the one shown in the same venue only three years earlier, and as an agreeable, even handsome portrait of a once-famous actor. The painting still is that handsome portrait, but more difficult to detect is that it is the remains of an icon of 18th-century British theatrical politics and a masterpiece within a classic genre of its time.

We are most grateful to Alex Kidson for confirming the attribution to Romney and writing this essay.

Provenance:
Unincreasibles Club where the work was raffled in 1787 and won by the surgeon William Long (1747-1818);
by descent to his nephew Walter J. Long; his posthumous Sale Christies 28 June 1890, lot 116, bought in;
Christies 6 June 1896, lot no 135 bought in;
J. H. Leigh Esquire (lent to Exhibition of Dramatic and Musical Art, Grafton Galleries, London, 1897, no. 106);
Miss Nicholson 1900, lent to Romney Exhibition, Grafton Galleries, 1900-1901, no. 94;
Christie's 23 June, 1901 lot 102 (verso label 102);
Christie's 15 February, 1929, lot 16 as "George Romney" (verso label: Collection no Nicholson / lot no. 17 (sic)- Remarks P); Christie's 21 March 1930, lot 22 as "George Romney"; Nicholson, London; American Art Association, New York, 18 May, 1933, Nicholson collection, lot no. 29;
Sotheby's Parke Bernet, New York, December 13, 1974, lot 87 (verso sticker 3701 X87);
Estate of Arthur Savarin Cohen, Maryland

Exhibited:
Exhibition of Dramatic and Musical Art, Grafton Galleries, London, 1897 (no. 106 - lent by J. H. Leigh, Esq.);
Romney Exhibition, Grafton Galleries, London, 1900-1901 (no. 94, Henderson (The Actor) as Macbeth - Lent by Miss M. A. Nicholson)

Literature:
Alex Kidson "George Romney - A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings," Yale University Press, 2015, 645c (will now be 645)