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, | George Washington | Portrait of John Jay | George Washington | Gilbert Stuart unfinished 1796 painting of George Washington |
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alexis de tocqueville
was born in Paris on July 29, 1805, of an aristocratic Norman family. He studied law in Paris (1823-1826) and then was appointed an assistant magistrate at Versailles (1827).
Washington Allston
1779-1843 Washington Allston Gallery Allston was born on a plantation on the Waccamaw River near Georgetown, South Carolina. His mother Rachel Moore had married Captain William Allston in 1775, though her husband died in 1781, shortly after the Battle of Cowpens. Moore remarried to Dr. Henry C. Flagg, the son of a wealthy shipping merchant from Newport, Rhode Island. Allston graduated from Harvard College in 1800 and moved to Charleston, South Carolina for a short time before sailing to England in May 1801. He was admitted to the Royal Academy in London in September, when painter Benjamin West was then the president. From 1803 to 1808 he visited the great museums of Paris and then for several years those of Italy, where he met Washington Irving in Rome, and Coleridge, his lifelong friend. In 1809 Allston married Ann Channing, sister of William Ellery Channing. Samuel F. B. Morse was one of Allston's art pupils and accompanied Allston to Europe in 1811. After traveling throughout western Europe, Allston finally settled in London, where he won fame and prizes for his pictures. Allston was also a published writer. In London in 1813, he published The Sylphs of the Seasons, with Other Poems, republished in Boston, Massachusetts later that year. His wife died in February 1815, leaving him saddened, lonely, and homesick for America. In 1818 he returned to the United States and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts for 25 years. He was the uncle of the artists George Whiting Flagg and Jared Bradley Flagg, both of whom studied painting under him. In 1841 he published Monaldi, a romance illustrating Italian life, and in 1850, a volume of his Lectures on Art, and Poems. Allston died on July 9, 1843, at age 64. Allston is buried in Harvard Square, in "the Old Burying Ground" between the First Parish Church and Christ Church.
Jasper Cropsey
American Hudson River School Painter, 1823-1900 Jasper Francis Cropsey (February 18, 1823 - April 23, 1900) was an important American landscape artist of the Hudson River School. Cropsey was born on his father Jacob Rezeau Cropsey's farm in Rossville on Staten Island, New York, the oldest of eight children. As a young boy, Cropsey had recurring periods of poor health. While absent from school, Cropsey taught himself to draw. His early drawings included architectural sketches and landscapes drawn on notepads and in the margins of his schoolbooks. After studying architecture for five years, he turned his attention to landscape painting, under the instruction of Edward Maury. He visited England, France, Switzerland, and Italy in 1847, went abroad again in 1855, and resided seven years in London, sending his pictures to the Royal Academy and to the International exhibition of 1862. After his return home in 1863, he opened a studio in New York, where he resided until 1885, when he removed to Hastings-on-Hudson. Trained as an architect, he set up his own office in 1843. Cropsey studied watercolor and life drawing at the National Academy of Design and first exhibited there in 1844. A year later he was elected an associate member and turned exclusively to landscape painting in the 1840s, shortly after he was featured in an exhibition entitled "Italian Compositions." Cropsey married Maria Cooley in May 1847, traveled in Europe from 1847-1849, was elected a full member of the Academy in 1851, and lived in England 1856-1863. During this time he specialized in autumnal landscape paintings of the northeastern United States, often idealized and with vivid colors. One such painting is "The Valley of the Wyoming" set in eastern Pennsylvania. The name of this valley was given to the western state of Wyoming. He co-founded, with ten fellow artists, the American Society of Painters in Water Colors in 1866.