Gilbert Stuart

Born in North Kingstown Township near Providence, Rhode Island, Stuart would rise above his modest circumstances to become the artistic heir of the great English artists Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney. As such, Stuart would bring the high style of eighteenth-century Georgian portraiture directly to the United States, painting not only our first five presidents, but almost every one of the political and social elite of New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D. C. and Boston in the Federalist period. He was universally praised for his fresh color and fluid brushstrokes with which he created lively and apt likenesses of his sitters. Over his career, he had only a few assistants and no formal students, yet he was generous in his advice to the upcoming generation of young artists, who sought him out. During his lifetime he was famous for his reputation as a European artist, yet now he is recalled as quintessentially American.

His father Gilbert Stewart (the artist would spell his surname differently) was a snuff-grinder who emigrated in or before 1750 from Perth, Scotland, to help a Scottish doctor establish one of the earliest snuff mills in New England. In 1751, Stewart married Elizabeth Anthony, whose family had been farmers in Rhode Island for several generations. Gilbert was the youngest of their three children; the oldest, a boy, died as an infant. The Stuart family lived on the upper floor of the snuff mill, a circumstance that Stuart would later ascribe as the cause of his well-known addiction to snuff. His father was not successful in his business and moved his family to his wife’s hometown of Newport when Stuart was six years old. Young Stuart’s quick intelligence and facility for art was evident early, and, at age fourteen, he began study with Scottish émigré artist Cosmo Alexander, then in Newport. In 1770 Stuart accompanied Alexander as the painter’s assistant on a southern trip to Williamsburg, Norfolk, and Charleston, from where they set sail for Edinburgh in 1771. Alexander died suddenly in the summer of 1772 and left Stuart apparently destitute of friends and support. The young man somehow managed to work his passage home on a ship, but, upon arrival, was in such terrible shape physically and mentally that he needed several weeks in solitude to recover. Thus back in Newport in 1773, only a year after Alexander’s death, Stuart showed evidence of his brief training in Scotland and received several commissions. But, by the fall of 1775, his family having relocated to Nova Scotia and the political situation in colonial New England worsening, Stuart set sail for London. Stuart initially got a position as a church organist but his situation quickly became desperate and eventually, deeply depressed and nearly starved, he appealed for help to the artist Benjamin West, court painter to George III, a Quaker originally from Pennsylvania. West would help a great number of American artists, who always found their way to his door with or without introductions, including John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, Matthew Pratt, and John Trumbull. Stuart worked in West’s studio from 1777 through 1782, gaining invaluable practical knowledge about artistic practice and society there.

While in London, Stuart would rise quickly, gaining great acclaim by 1782. In 1786, he married Charlotte Coates. His good fortune, however, was short-lived; the following year, he and his wife were forced to escape to Ireland to avoid creditors, leaving behind unfinished canvasses. In Dublin he had no artistic rival and so secured important portrait commissions. Yet, over the next five years, the artist’s life once again followed a pattern of “. . . artistic success, extravagance, debt, and finally flight … to escape his creditors” [1] Stuart would return to New York in 1793, relocating to Philadelphia the following year with the expressed intention of painting George Washington’s portrait. He worked in Philadelphia until 1803, moving to the new federal city of Washington from 1803 to 1805 and then finally on to Boston, where he lived until he died in 1828. Each move involved escaping debts and starting over, which his fame and talent always made possible.

In London, Stuart would have learned from West and Sir Joshua Reynolds the accepted procedure for painting a portrait. There were four standard sizes (the price increasing with the scale): the bust, twenty five by thirty inches; the kit-kat, somewhat larger and proportionally taller than the bust; the three-quarter length which showed the subject(s) to the knees and the full-length portrait which was the most important to the artist’s reputation. Usually a subject would pose for three sittings, for about ninety minutes each session. It was also possible for the sitter to pose in one day, taking breaks as needed but allowing the artist to concentrate on capturing a facial likeness. A sitter was invited to look through engravings of historic paintings to help choose a background, pose, or any number of accessories. Once this was accomplished, the artist would finish the rest of the painting at a later time without requiring the sitter to be present. [2] It was general practice for the artist to receive half the fee at the first sitting. Unfortunately Stuart might take the money and then never get around to finishing the portrait, often holding onto such unfinished canvasses for years. The most famous example of many involves the so-called “Atheneum” portraits of George and Martha Washington done from life in 1796 that he kept until he died. Whether this was cold calculation or genuine mental confusion—as he insisted that George Washington had allowed him to keep these as reference for Stuart to make additional copies—remains unclear. In any case, no Stuart paintings ever made it to Mount Vernon.

Stuart’s life is full of great international success and recurring embarrassing episodes. In considering his paradoxical behavior and uneven production of his work, the art historian Dorinda Evans has suggested that Stuart had a bipolar disorder. [3] Being manic depressive is consistent with many contemporary accounts of his behavior throughout his lifetime, from lifelong friend and medical doctor Benjamin Waterhouse, “(w)ith Stuart it was either high tide or low tide,” [4] to First Lady Abigail Adams “superior talents give no security for propriety of conduct; there is no knowing how to take hold of this Man, nor by what means to prevail upon him to fulfill his engagements.” [5]

Art historians Carrie Rebora Barratt and Ellen Miles describe him further: “(Stuart)” was extremely prolific and may have painted over a thousand portraits, but quite often he failed to finish works especially if the sitters annoyed or bored him. He commanded high prices for his work but constantly teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. He was charming and cantankerous, tolerant and opinionated, curious and dogmatic, easily offended but resilient, articulate and verbose. . .characterizations of him are in equal contrast, describing someone at once noble, charming, and dreadful.” [6]

Endnotes

[1] n.a. Gilbert Stuart: Portraitist of the Young Republic 1755-1828 (Washington, D.C: National Gallery of Art, 1967), p. 23.

[2] Charles Merrill Mount, Gilbert Stuart: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1964), p. 20.

[3] Dorinda Evans, “Gilbert Stuart and Manic Depression: Redefining His Artistic Range,”American Art 18:1 (Spring 2004), pp. 10-31.

[4] Mount, p. 42.

[5] Abigail Adams, letter to John Quincy Adams, December 30, 1804, Adams Papers, microfilm no. 403, from Andrew Oliver, Portraits of John and Abigail Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 134.

[6] Carrie Rebora Barratt and Ellen F. Miles, Gilbert Stuart (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), p. 4.