Gilbert Stuart in England and Ireland

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2004 by Carrie Rebora Barratt

The finest painter of America's early national period was only nineteen years old when he arrived in London in November 1775. Unlike his elder compatriots Benjamin West (see Pl. III) and John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), each of whom set out for Europe with an itinerary and a master plan, Gilbert Stuart (Pl. I) had only the notion that he might catch up with his best friend from childhood, Benjamin Waterhouse (Pl. IV), who had gone abroad for medical training. The painter who would later execute portraits of the first five American presidents began his career abroad playing the organ at Saint Katherine Cree Church near Foster Lane. He took squalid boarding-house rooms in the York Buildings on the River Thames just below the Strand and wandered aimlessly through the streets of London for the better part of a year, weaving through the city's teeming hoards "with countenances as serious as if their heads were full of the most weighty affairs ... [but] are employed in nothing but idleness." (1) But a painter of Stuart's talents could not remain idle for long, and his endeavors in Great Britain made him one of the finest American portraitists of the era.

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Just how the son of a Scottish immigrant snuff millwright, trained in Edinburgh, London, and Dublin, became the most esteemed American artist of his generation is a tale of the ties that bound this country to its mother-land, even after the American Revolution. For too long, historians keen to establish the iconic provincial character of Stuart's work have lost sight of the fact that by the early 1780s he had been taken into the ranks of English painters--his finest works on view at the Royal Academy of Arts in London without thought that the portraits were in any way recognizably American. In April 1787 the London newspaper the World acclaimed him as "The Vandyke of the Time," high praise connecting a virtually self-taught artist from Rhode Island to England's most revered portraitist. "In the most arduous and valuable achievements of portrait painting, identity and duration, Stuart takes the lead of every competitor.... Stuart dives deep," the writer averred:

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less deep than Sir Joshua [Reynolds; 1723-1792], more deep than every
other pencil--Stuart dives deep into mind, and brings up with him a
conspicuous draught of character and characteristic thought--all as
sensible to feeling and to sight as the most palpable projection of any
feature of a face. (2)

Gilbert Charles Stuart was born on December 3, 1755, at his father's millhouse in North Kingston, Rhode Island, and was raised there until 1761, when his mother. Elizabeth Anthony (1728-1816), inherited a small property in nearby Newport. The Stuarts moved up to the retail trade with a shop in Banister's Wharf, selling and trading snuff, mustard flour, and a great variety of dry goods. Unlike Copley, the son of Irish tobacconists who absorbed into his artistic practice the intricate mechanisms of Boston's commercial trade, young Stuart did not emerge from Newport's heady and competitive global emporium with a head for business. (3) The prized pupil of the Trinity Church organist John Knoechel (or Knotchel), Stuart stumbled upon drawing by chance and made his first painting in 1769 for his family physician: it was a portrait of the spaniels of Dr. William Hunter (c. 1730-1777) (Hunter House, Preservation Society of Newport County, Newport, Rhode Island). The master of Scottish networking in Newport, Hunter introduced Stuart to the recently arrived Aberdeen artist Cosmo Alexander (1724-1772). The son and grandson of portraitists, Alexander pursued a lucrative itinerancy painting portraits in America, and when he had exhausted his possibilities, he returned to Scotland, with Stuart in tow.

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Stuart's internship was cut short when Alexander died in August 1772, but not before his teacher had undoubtedly steeped him in the aesthetics of historical and contemporary Scottish portraiture, at least as far as his family was concerned. The portraits Stuart produced upon his return to Newport in the fall of 1773, such as those of John (1744-1807) and Christian Banister (1747-1830) and their son John Jr. (1769-1831) (both Redwood Library and Athenaeum, Newport), show the decided influence of Alexander's brother-in-law, George Chalmers (c. 1720-c. 1791), who is usually charged with abandoning Stuart in financial straits at the University of Glasgow, but it is more likely he took some care to continue Stuart's artistic training. Stuart's knack for Scottish style portraiture gave him a following in New York City, but more than anything else prepared him for London, to which he sailed on September 8, 1775.

Stuart floundered around in London for several months, until his friend Waterhouse returned from medical school in Edinburgh. His earliest commissions there can all be linked to Waterhouse's medical community, the first of which came from William Curtis (1746-1799), a young botanist who worked at the Apothecaries' Company on Gracechurch Street. Stuart made a keen character study (Royal Horticultural Society, London) of the affable but serious young man posed with his illustration of foxglove from his lavish tome Flora Londinensis: or, Plates and Descriptions of Such Plants as Grow Wild in the Environs of London ... (1777-1798). Waterhouse's mentor and relative, the esteemed Dr. John Fothergill (1712-1780), paid Stuart ten guineas to paint a portrait of Waterhouse, who in turn pulled the proper strings to get Stuart the distinguished commission to paint a full-length exhibition piece of the medical philanthropist Dr. John Coakley Lettsom (1744-1815). Although Stuart finished neither of these pictures, Waterhouse was still able to convince a group of his fellow students to pool their money for a portrait of their lecturer Dr. George Fordyce (1736-1802), a Scottish physician. Stuart took the assignment and the payment, but never even began the work, compelling Waterhouse to return the contributions out of his own pocket.