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 :. | Anna Payne Cutts | Portrait of George Washington | Portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds | Colonel Isaac Barre | John Quincy Adams |
Related Artists:
Pieter de Kempener
Pedro Campana (1503-1586) was a Flemish painter of the Renaissance period, mainly active in Italy and Spain. His actual name was Pieter de Kempeneer, translated into French as Champaigne, and was also known as Peter Van de Velde. Born in Brussels, he trained there with Bernard Van Orley. His early life appears to have been spent in Italy, where he carefully studied the paintings of Raphael, and declared himself as his pupil. In 1530 he was at work at some scene-painting, representing a triumphal arch to be erected on the occasion of the coronation of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor in Bologna, and he then left for Spain, on the advice, it is said, of Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and spent the rest of his life in that country, only returning to Brussels about 1563 or 1565. Between 1537 and 1562 he was associated with Luis de Vargas and the Italian sculptor Torregiano in establishing a school of painting in Seville, which eventually became the academy of the place; amongst the pupils educated in it was Morales. He painted for the monastery of St. Mary of Grace, Church of Santa Cruz, in the city, an altar-piece representing the Descent from the Cross (1548), which is now in the cathedral, having been removed there when the church fell into ruins. There are other works by the same painter in Seville Cathedral, especially two representing the Purification of the Virgin and the Resurrection; and the various churches of the city, S. Isidoro, S. Pedro, S. Catalina, and S. Juan, all possess paintings by this artist. One of his last works was the restoration and repainting of a chapel belonging to Hernando de Jaen, an important resident of Seville. Murillo requested that he be buried near Campana's picture, and his burial took place in the Church of Santa Cruz, close underneath the Descent from the Cross, but the whole building was burned to the ground during the Napoleonic Wars, and the tomb perished.
Pieter Saenredam
b. 1597, Assendelft, d. 1665, Haarlem,Painter and draughtsman, son of Jan Saenredam. His paintings of churches and the old town halls in Haarlem, Utrecht and Amsterdam must have been appreciated by contemporary viewers principally as faithful representations of familiar and meaningful monuments. Yet they also reveal his exceptional sensitivity to aesthetic values; his paintings embody the most discriminating considerations of composition, colouring and craftsmanship. His oeuvre is comparatively small, the paintings numbering no more than 60, and each is obviously the product of careful calculation and many weeks of work. Their most striking features, unusual in the genre, are their light, closely valued tonalities and their restrained, restful and delicately balanced compositions. These pictures, always executed on smooth panels, are remarkable for their sense of harmony and, in some instances, serenity. Here, perhaps, lies a trace of filial fidelity to the Mannerist tradition of refinement and elegance, of lines never lacking in precision and grace. But Mannerist figures and the more comparable components of strap- and scrollwork embellishment lack the tension and clarity of Saenredam's designs, which also have a completeness reminiscent of the fugues of Gerrit Sweelinck (1566-?1628).
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.