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 :. | George Washington | George Washington | Children of the Second Duke of Northumberland | Der Schlittschuhlaufer | Catherine Brass Yates, |
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Antoine Caron
1520-1598 French Antoine Caron Location Antoine Caron (1521 in Beauvais - 1599 in Paris) was a French master glassmaker, illustrator, Mannerist painter and a master (teacher) at the School of Fontainebleau. He is one of the few French painters of his time who had a pronounced artistic personality. His work reflects the refined, although highly unstable, atmosphere at the court of the House of Valois during the French Wars of Religion of 1560 to 1598.
MASTER of Heiligenkreuz
Austrian Northern Renaissance Painter, 15th Century,was an Austrian painter active at the beginning of the fifteenth century; a tentative lifespan of 1395 to 1430 has been put forth, but this appears highly conjectural. His name is taken from a diptych that once belonged to the Cistercian Abbey of Heiligenkreuz, located in southeastern Austria near the present-day border with Hungary. The left panel depicts the Annunciation on the obverse; the reverse is a depiction of the Madonna and Child. The right panel depicts the Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine, with Saint Dorothy on its reverse. Details of costume and iconography combine with associations with the International Style to indicate a date of around the first decade of the fifteenth century. It was initially proposed, by Betty Kurth in 1922, that the artist was French and had some association with the court in Paris. Other writers have disagreed, and various nationalities including French, Austrian, German, or Bohemian have been posited for the Master. Some have further suggested that he was an itinerant court artist, trained in France but active in Austria. Various clues have been used in an attempt to describe his nationality. These include his use of finely-worked gold decoration, in which some have seen a link to Franco-Burgundian goldsmith's work of the late fourteenth century. Others, instead, see it as a link to the school of panel painting then active at the court in Prague. Consequently, it seems highly unlikely that the artist's nationality will be conclusively established.
Thomas Patch
1725 - 1782 was an English painter, engraver and caricaturist. He made a living by basing himself in Italy and undertaking commissions from rich young British men on Grand tours.His paintings today are in the Royal Collection and various museums. Patch was thrown out of Rome for a homosexual act. Patch was born in Exeter in 1725, the son of a doctor. He had not completed his medical studies when he came to Rome in 1747 as a grand tourist and where he met Joshua Reynolds. Initially he worked for Joseph Vernet, creating landscapes of Tivoli and pastiches of Vernet's work. He was forced to leave Rome after some homosexual He was in Florence in 1755, where he was commissioned to paint people on their Grand tours. Here he was assisted by his friendship with Sir Horace Mann, who was the British envoy and therefore a point of contact with British tourists arriving in Florence. While there he completed studies of human physiognomy, looking at the expressions and facial types as well as completing portraits of many in the British society in Florence. He also studied the old masters and published studies of them. Towards the end of his life his output of paintings slowed.Patch was also known to be an art dealer. In about 1763, Patch completed three views of Florence that are now part of the Royal Collection. They are thought to have been bought by George III. On October 19, 1767, he was enterprising enough to witness the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius which he painted from both the land and the sea.