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 :. | Portrait of George Washington | President | John Adams | George Washington | Portrait of James Madison |
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Camillo Procaccini
(1551 - August 21, 1629) was an Italian painter. He has been posthumously referred to as the Vasari of Lombardy, for his prolific Mannerist fresco decoration. Born in Bologna, he was the son of the painter Ercole Procaccini the Elder, and older brother to Giulio Cesare and Carlo Antonio, both painters. In 1587 he distinguished in the fresco decoration of the Basilica della Ghiara in Reggio Emilia. In the late 1580s he moved to Milan, where count Camillo Visconti Borromeo commissioned him the decoration of his villa in Lainate. The organ shutters for the Cathedral of Milan were painted after 1590 by Camillo, Giuseppe Meda (died 1599), and Ambrogio Figino. His other works of note include the frescoes of the nave and the apse of the Cathedral of Piacenza in collaboration with Ludovico Carracci (1605 - 1609), and the vault and choir in Santi Paolo e Barnaba of Milan. Also famous is a Nativity in the Sacro Monte d'Orta. Among his pupils is Carlo Biffi. Among his many other works are a Martyrdom of St. Agnes painted in fresco in the sacristy of Milan cathedral; a Madonna and Child painted for the church of Santa Maria del Carmine; an 'Adoration of the Shepherds found in the Brera; and the ceiling of the church of Padri Zoccolanti, representing the Assumption of the Virgin. eall in the same city. He also painted a Last Judgment for the church of San Prospero at Reggio; He painted a St. Roch administering the Sacrament to the Plague-stricken.
Maurycy Gottlieb
Drohobytsch, February 21/28, 1856 - Krakew, July 17, 1879) was a Jewish painter, of Polish-speaking Galician Jews from the western part of Ukraine. He was born in Drohobych (at that time Austria-Hungary), Galicia, modern Lviv region, western Ukraine. Maurycy was one of Isaac and Fanya Tigerman Gottlieb's eleven children. At fifteen, he was enrolled at the Vienna Fine Arts Academy. Later, he would study under Jan Matejko in Krakew. However, he experienced anti-semitism from his fellow students, and left Matejko's studio after less than a year, he then traveled to Norway settling in Molde. After several years he returned to Vienna to pursue his Jewish roots. At twenty, he won a gold medal from a Munich art competition for Shylock and Jessica (at right), showing a scene from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. He based Jessica's face on that of Laura Rosenfeld, to whom he had proposed marriage. However, Rosenfeld rejected his proposal, and wed a Berlin banker. Gottlieb then planned to marry Lola Rosengarten, but when he heard about Rosenfeld's marriage he committed suicide by exposure to the elements, dying of complications from a cold. Despite his early death, more than three hundred of his works survive, though not all are finished. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, many Polish collections unknown in the West were discovered, and his reputation grew greatly. His brother, painter Leopold Gottlieb, was born five years after his death.
Henri De Braekeleer
Belgian Painter, 1840-1888 Belgian painter, was born at Antwerp. He was trained by his father, a genre painter, and his uncle, Baron Henri Leys, and devoted himself to scenes of everyday Antwerp life. The first pictures he exhibited, The Laundry (Van Cutsem collection, Brussels), and The Coppersmith's Workshop (Vleeshouwer collection, Antwerp), were shown. at the Antwerp exhibition in 1861. He received the gold medal at Brussels in 1872 for The Geographer and The Lesson (both in the Brussels gallery); the gold medal at Vienna in 1873 for The Painter's Studio and Grandmother's Birthday ; and the medal of honor at the Exposition Universelle at Amsterdam for The Pilot House. Among his more notable works are A Shoemaker (1862), A Tailor's Workroom (1863), A Gardener (1864, Antwerp gallery), Interior of a Church (1866), Interior, Flanders (1867), Woman Spinning (1869), Man Reading (1871), Theruedu Serment, Antwerp (1875), A Copperplate Printer, The Sailor's Return, The Man at the Window (Couteaux collection, Brussels), The Horn-blower (Couteaux collection), Man Retouching a Picture (Couteaux collection), The Potters (Marlier collection, Brussels), Staircase in the Hydraulic House at Antwerp (Marlier collection), and The Brewer's House at Antwerp (Marlier collection). The last, better known as A Man Sitting, is generally regarded as his masterpiece. As a lithographer and etcher, his work resembles that of Henri Leys.