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 :. | John Quincy Adams | Colonel Isaac Barre | Portrait of George Washington | Second Duke of Northumberland | Joseph Brant |
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Nicolas Mignard
(1606-1668) was a French 17th Century painter. He spent most of his active life in Avignon and was the older brother of Pierre Mignard. Nicolas Mignard was born in Troyes in 1606. There, he studied painting with a local master. After traveling to Fontainebleau, Mignard came to Avignon in 1632. He then traveled to Rome with Cardinal Archbishop of Lyon. Mignard came back to Avignon in 1636, after having executed multiple series of etching in Rome. There, he mostly painted for religious institutions. Mignard spent the end of his life in Paris, where he became a successful portrait painter. Mignard left Paris after a visit of King Louis XIV and his Court in Avignon. King Louis XIV decided to bring Mignard to Paris. Mignard eventually joined the Academie Royale. Mignardes spending most of his life in Avignon made his career somewhat overshadowed by his little brother Pierre, who was installed in Paris. After his death, paintings by Nicolas Mignard mostly stayed in Avignon or in small cities around Avignon. During the French Revolution, as these paintings were taken over, most of them were attributed to Pierre Mignard. His art is now rediscovered. His style is typical of the Italianate classicizing aesthetic that dominated seventeenth-century France, and obviously was very much influenced by French classical Baroque painter Poussin. Nicolas Mignard died in 1668 in Paris.
Joseph E.Southall
1861-1944
Ludwig Deutsch
Austrian-born French Academic Painter, 1855-1935