1755-1828 Gilbert Stuart was born in North Kingston, R.I., on Dec. 3, 1755. At the age of 13 or 14 he studied art with the Scottish painter Cosmo Alexander in Newport. With Alexander he made a tour of the South and a journey to Edinburgh, where Alexander died in 1772. For about a year Stuart remained, poverty-stricken, in Scotland, but finally, working as a sailor, he managed to get back to America. There he executed a few portraits in a hard limner fashion. 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. For the first 4 or 5 years, Stuart served as the first assistant of American expatriate painter Benjamin West, who had rescued him from poverty. From the first, Stuart showed an interest only in portraiture and had no desire to go into the branch of history painting West practiced. After 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. 1782). For a while Stuart lived in splendor, but being a bad businessman and a profligate spender, he was in constant debt. He lived in Ireland from 1787 to 1792 and then returned to America to make a fortune,  Related Paintings of Gilbert Stuart :. | A Self Portrait of Gilbert Stuart, Painted in 1778 | Colonel David Humphreys | John Adams | Portrait of George Washington | Anna Payne Cutts |
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George L. Seymour
British, act. 1876 - 1916 Seymour was a son of Lord Hugh Seymour (himself a son of Francis Seymour-Conway, 1st Marquess of Hertford) and Anna Horatia Waldegrave (a daughter of James Waldegrave, 2nd Earl Waldegrave) and entered the Royal Navy in 1797. He captained HMS Pallas during the Battle of Basque Roads and HMS Leonidas and HMS Fortun??e during the War of 1812. For his part in the latter war, he was appointed a CB in 1815 (alongside many other Captains) and a KCH in 1831 (and later a GCH in 1834). He rose through the ranks in the navy over the years and in 1852 was appointed a KCB (and later a GCB in 1860) and finally as an Admiral of the Fleet in 1866.
Momper, Franqois de
Flemish, 1603-1660
francois couperin
was a French Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist. François Couperin was known as "Couperin le Grand" (Couperin the Great) to distinguish him from the other members of the musically talented Couperin family.