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 :. | Joseph Brant | President | William Woollett | Children of the Second Duke of Northumberland | Portrait of Govenor John Brooks |
Related Artists:
Jacopo di Arcangelo called jacopo del sellajo
Florence 1441/2-1493
Agostino Tassi
(1578--1644) was an Italian painter, mostly of landscapes and seascapes. Because he aspired to nobility he modified the details of his early life. Though he was born in Perugia he claimed to have been born in Rome. His family name was Buonamici, but Agostino adopted the surname Tassi to give substance to his story that he was adopted by the Marchese Tassi. He was actually the son of a furrier named Domenico.
Worth Brehm
American, 1883-1928