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 :. | Colonel Isaac Barre | Portrait of George Washington | George Washington | Colonel David Humphreys | Portrait of Connecticut politician and governor Oliver Wolcott, |
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antoine pevsner
Antoine Pevsner (18 January 1886 ?C 12 April 1962) was a Belarusian and Russian sculptor and the older brother of Alexii Pevsner and Naum Gabo. Both Antoine and Naum are considered pioneers of twentieth-century sculpture. Pevsner was born in Klimavichy, Belarus. Among the originators of and having coined the term, Constructivism, and pioneers of Kinetic Art, they discovered a new use for metals and welding and made a new marriage of art and mathematics.
Julian Ashton
Australian Painter, 1851-1942 was an Australian artist and teacher, known for his support of the Heidelberg School and for his influential art school in Sydney. Ashton was born in Addlestone, Surrey, England and arrived in Australia in 1878 with a background in the contemporary French realism of the Barbizon School, which emphasised painting en plein air (i.e. direct from nature, as opposed to studio-based painting), and which laid the basis for the Impressionist movement. As a trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales he championed emerging Australian artists of the Australian Impressionist or Heidelberg School, and the Gallery's decision to collect these works owes much to his influence. According to James Gleeson, Ashton's oil paintings, much-admired in his own lifetime,
Pearce, Charles Sprague
American, 1851-1914 American artist, was born at Boston, Massachusetts. In 1873 Pearce became a pupil of L??on Bonnat in Paris, and after 1885 he lived in Paris and at Auvers-sur-Oise. He painted Egyptian and Algerian scenes, French peasants, and portraits, and also decorative work, notably for the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress at Washington. He received medals at the Paris Salon and elsewhere, and was made Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, decorated with the Order of Leopold, Belgium, the Order of the Red Eagle, Prussia, and the Order of the Dannebrog, Denmark. Among his best known paintings are The Decapitation of St John the Baptist (1881), in the Art Institute of Chicago; Prayer (1884),