At the end of his life, according to his daughter, he could dash off portraits of Washington at the rate of one every 2 hours. After a while, Stuart could produce Washington's features rapidly, with little effort. The three versions were the Vaughan portrait, showing the right side of Washington's face (1795, original destroyed), the full-length Landsdowne portrait (1796), and the unfinished Athenaeum portrait (1796).

He made three basic versions of Washington as an elder statesman-all remote, dignified, with a wonderful sense of composure, without exterior paraphernalia or insignia to identify his rank-and based all his future portraits of Washington on them. Without obvious flattery, still catching the essentialĬharacter, he presented careful regularizations and glosses. But there is no hint of this in any of Stuart's portraits. Stuart painted Washington at a time when the general's physique was beginning to break down and he was wearing false teeth. Yet it was Stuart who created the iconic image of Washington recognized by generations of Americans. It may have been partly because of this that Stuart interpreted Washington in an aloof and imperious manner, rather than in the more intimate way that Charles Wilson Peale did. All his features were indicative of the strongest passions.' Because of the painter's carefree, libertine ways, Washington behaved coldly toward him. The sockets of the eyes, for instance, were larger than what I ever met with before…. 'There were features in his face,' he observed, 'totally different from what I had observed in any other human being. He worked in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington until 1805, when he permanently established his studio in Boston.įrom the first, Stuart seems to have been awed by Washington.

He lived in Ireland from 1787 to 1792 and then returned to America to make a fortune, he said, by painting Washington's portrait. For a while Stuart lived in splendor, but being a bad businessman and a profligate spender, he was in constant debt. His apprenticeship, Stuart became London's leading portrait painter, next to Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, whose style he emulated, as in a rare full-length portrait of William Grant of Congalton as The Skater (ca. From the first, Stuart showed an interest only in portraiture and had no desire to go into the branch of history painting West practiced. With the Revolutionary War threatening, his family, who had Tory sympathies, fled to Nova Scotia, and Stuart sailed for London, where he remained from 1775 to 1787.įor the first 4 or 5 years, Stuart served as the first assistant of American expatriate painter Benjamin West, who had rescued him from poverty. There he executed a few portraits in a hard limner fashion. For about a year Stuart remained, poverty-stricken, in Scotland, but finally, working as a sailor, he managed to get back to America. With Alexander he made a tour of the South and a journey to Edinburgh, where Alexander died in 1772. At the age of 13 or 14 he studied art with the Scottish painter Cosmo Alexander in Newport. Gilbert Stuart was born in North Kingston, R.I., on Dec.

Washington portrait painter