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 :. | the skater | Portrait of Robert R. Livingston | Portrait of John Randolph | William Woollett | Gilbert Stuart unfinished 1796 painting of George Washington |
Related Artists:
Henri Pierre Danloux
1753-1809 French French painter and draughtsman. He was orphaned at an early age and was brought up by an uncle who was an architect and contractor. Around 1770 his uncle apprenticed him to Nicolas-Bernard Lpici. He exhibited for the first time in 1771 at the Exposition de la Jeunesse in Paris, where he showed a Drunkard at a Table (untraced). About 1773 he was admitted into the studio of Joseph-Marie Vien, whom he followed to Rome in 1775 on the latter appointment as Director of the Academie de France. Danloux sketchbooks show that he also travelled to Naples, Palermo, Florence and Venice. He was not interested in the monuments of antiquity but concentrated instead on drawing landscapes and, in particular, portraits, among them that of Jacques-Louis David.
George Washington

Michel Gobin
painted Junger Mann mit Pfeife in 1681