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 | Portrait of Connecticut politician and governor Oliver Wolcott | Joseph Bailangte | Fohn Adams | Portrait of Elizabeth Chipman Gray |
Related Artists:
EERTVELT, Andries van
Flemish painter (b. 1590, Antwerpen, d. 1652, ?) Flemish painter. He enrolled as a member of Antwerp's Guild of St Luke in 1609. In 1615 he married Catherine Vlieger (d 1627), after whose death he went to Genoa, where he worked for Cornelis de Wael. By c. 1630 he was back in Antwerp, where he had his portrait painted by Anthony van Dyck (1632; Augsburg, Schaezlerpal.). In 1633 Eertvelt married Elisabeth Boots, probably a daughter of the Antwerp painter Jan Boots (b before 1620). Eertvelt is regarded as the first Flemish marine painter. Over the years his palette and style changed. His first paintings, mostly of ships in storms (e.g. Sea Battle in a Storm; Schwerin, Staatl. Mus.), were painted in greenish-black and brown tones, often using white to highlight the rigging against the dark sea. After his tour of Italy he favoured views of southern harbours, with calm seas painted in soft tones (e.g. Spanish Ships Leaving a Port; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.). In his day Eertvelt was a man of distinction whose artistic qualities were praised by the poet Cornelis de Bie and whose marine paintings were appreciated abroad, some being exported as far as Seville and Lisbon.
Hermann Faber
1832-1913
Leo Gausson
French, 1860-1944