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 :. | Colonel David Humphreys | Portrait of Govenor John Brooks | John Adams | George Washington | Der Koch von George Washington |
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Sebastiano Bombelli
Italian, 1635-1719, Italian painter. He was perhaps the most influential Italian portrait painter of the later 17th century. His early style was formed by his father, Valentino Bombelli, a painter in Udine, and his godfather, the Mannerist artist Girolamo Lugaro. In the early 1660s he was in Venice (Boschini; Sansovino), where he responded passionately to the brilliant colour, painterly freedom and naturalism of 16th-century Venetian artists, particularly Veronese
Alexei Jawlensky
1864-1941 Russian Alexei Jawlensky Galleries Alexej von Jawlensky was born in Torzhok, a town in the department of Tver, Russia, as the fifth child of Georgi von Jawlensky and his wife Alexandra (n??e Medwedewa). His family was aristocratic. At the age of ten he moved with his family to Moscow. After a few years of military training, he became interested in painting, visiting the Moscow World Exposition c. in 1880. In 1896 he moved to Munich where he studied in the private school of Anton Azbe. In Munich he met Wassily Kandinsky, and Marianne von Werefkin, other Russian artists and helped form the Neue Kunstlervereinigung M??nchen. His work in this period was lush and richly coloured, but later moved towards abstraction with a simplified and formulaic style in a search to find the spiritual. Alexej von Jawlensky. Abstract Head, c. 1928He died in Wiesbaden, Germany on 15 March 1941.
seraphine
Seraphine Louis, known as "Seraphine de Senlis" ("Seraphine of Senlis") (1864?C1942), was a French painter in the naïve style. Self-taught, she was inspired by her religious faith and by stained-glass church windows and other religious art. The intensity of her images, both in color and in replicative designs, are sometimes interpreted as a reflection of her own psyche, walking a tightrope between ecstasy and mental illness.