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 :. | President | PeterGansevoortByStuart | Oil on canvas portrait of George Washington at Dorchester Heights. | Portrait of John Jay | Mrs. Richard Yates |
Related Artists:
John Cleveley
circa 1712-77 English painter, born in Southwark, London. Cleveley did not come from an artistic background
Jean Clouet
French Painter, ca.1485-1541 painter. He was chief painter to Francis I and produced many pastel portraits of members of the French court. Clouet was one of the best 16th-century portrait painters, both incisive and delicate in the psychological characterization of sitters. His drawings are simple, broad, and subtle; his paintings are fresh in colour, subdued in modeling, and minute in execution. He was celebrated in his lifetime as the equal of Michelangelo. His son Francois Clouet (c. 1515 ?C 72) took his place as official painter to Francis I in 1540.
Anselm van Hulle
painted Anna Margareta Wrangel, countess of Salmis in 1648