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 | Oil on canvas portrait of George Washington at Dorchester Heights. | Thomas Jefferson | Portrait of Don Jose de Jaudenes y Nebot | George Washington |
Related Artists:
Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck
(between 1600 and 1603, Haarlem - buried June 30, 1662, Haarlem) was a gifted Dutch Golden Age portraitist. He was the son of the painter Cornelis Engelsz from Gouda, who taught him to paint portraits. In 1632 he became a member of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke and started a successful career as a portraitist of mostly Catholic sitters in Haarlem. He may have been a Frans Hals pupil, and was strongly influenced by him, especially in his natural expressions and relaxed poses. He is best known for his exactness in painting details such as jewelry and lace, which made him quite popular with female sitters. Most notably, he won a lucrative commission in 1642 for a group portrait of the regentesses of the St. Elisabeth Gasthuis, at the time the wealthiest charity institution in Haarlem. This was won at the expense of Frans Hals himself, who had painted the regents of the St. Elisabeth Gasthuis in 1641 and fully expected to win the commission for the women.
Laurens Craen
Laurens Craen (c. 1620, The Hague - c.1670, Middelburg ), was a Dutch Golden Age painter.
GENTILESCHI, Artemisia
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1593-1652 Tuscan painter, daughter and pupil of Orazio Gentileschi, b. Rome. She studied under Agostino Tassi, her father's collaborator, who was convicted of raping the teen-age Artemisia in 1612. Over the years, she has been portrayed as a strumpet, a feminist victim or heroine, and an independent woman of her era and her life has been fictionalized in several novels and plays. In purely artistic terms, she achieved renown for her spirited execution and admirable use of chiaroscuro in the style of Caravaggio, and during her life she achieved both success and fame. In 1616 she became the first woman admitted to the Academy of Design in Florence. About 1638 she visited England, where she was in great demand as a portraitist. Among her works are Judith and Holofernes (Uffizi);