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 John Randolph | Thomas Jefferson | George Washington | John Banister | Catherine Brass Yates, |
Related Artists:
Charles Bargue
(c. 1826/1827?CApril 61883) was a French artist, a lithographer as well as a painter, who devised a drawing course. Charles Bargue is mostly remembered for his Cours de dessin, one of the most influential classical drawing courses conceived in collaboration with Jean-L??on G??rôme. The course, published between 1866 and 1871 by Goupil & Cie, and composed of 197 lithographs printed as individual sheets, was to guide students from plaster casts to the study of great master drawings and finally to drawing from the living model. Among the artists whose work is based on the study of Bargue's platework, is Vincent van Gogh who copied the complete set in 1880/1881, and (at least a part of it) again in 1890.
Willam mulready,R.A.
1786-1863
John Kane
1860-1934 American painter of Scottish birth. In 1879 Kane emigrated to western Pennsylvania. He worked as a bricklayer, coal miner, steel worker and carpenter in the Ohio River valley and, in 1890, began to sketch local scenery. After losing his leg in a train accident in 1891, he was employed painting railway carriages. When his son died in 1904, Kane left his family and spent years wandering and working in odd jobs; his earliest surviving paintings date from around 1910. Settling in Pittsburgh, he worked as a house painter and in his spare time painted portraits, religious subjects, the city's urban landscape and memories of his Scottish childhood. In 1927 the jury of the Carnegie International Exhibition, Pittsburgh, encouraged by the painter-juror Andrew Dasburg (b 1887), accepted Kane's Scene in the Scottish Highlands (1927; Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie Mus. A.). Kane's success, at first considered a hoax by the press, was based on the modernist interest in primitive and folk art. His work was regarded as non-academic and boldly original, and he became the first contemporary American folk artist to be recognized by a museum. Larimer Avenue Bridge (1932; Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie Mus. A.) is characteristic of his style with its meticulous detail, flat colour and dominant green and red. Though he sketched and painted on the site, Kane freely transposed pictorial elements to create a more pleasing composition. This innate compositional sense is evident in his Self-portrait (1929; New York, MOMA).