“ANOTHER King arose which knew not Joseph,” and so it goes still. Most American children are familiar with the so-called “AthenÆum Portrait of George Washington,” yet probably very few, even of their parents, know the name of the artist, Gilbert Stuart. We have got into the habit of dating the growth of modern American painting from 1875, and with some reasonableness, for that was the period at which students began to arrive home from Munich and Paris in sufficient numbers to make their arrival felt. Yet twenty-five years earlier, about the time that George Inness was starting for Europe, William M. Hunt had returned, bringing with him pictures of the Barbizon painters and introducing their principles of nature study. We are apt to dismiss the painting of the previous half-century as representing only the draggled ends of the English influence rudely severed by the Revolution; forgetting that the period is linked on to the Augustan age of English painting, to Reynolds, Gainsborough, and the somewhat later Constable. For Gilbert Stuart was a contemporary of all three, and to some extent a rival of Reynolds, even in London, and was born also within the lifetime of the first of the great Englishmen, William Hogarth. Stuart, moreover, was not a follower of others, but a distinct and forceful individuality that played a leading rÔle in the stirring drama of his times. He was, with little doubt, the first of American masters of painting.

There is a romance in every life, however gray and level, but in Stuart’s the romance foamed upon the surface. Perhaps he had inherited it; for his father, a native of Perth, in Scotland, reached this country shortly after the battle of Culloden Moor, that shattered the prospects of the Pretender; and there is more than a suspicion that his espousal of a lost cause had made it well to put the ocean between himself and his past. However that may be, he built himself a little mill with a gambrel roof, at the head of the Petaquamscott Pond, in Narragansett county, R.I., and settled down to the quiet occupation of grinding snuff. He had married, and in 1755, after several other children, came a boy, who received the name of his father, and was duly entered in the baptismal registry as “son of the snuff grinder.” But in time the mill proved unprofitable, and the family migrated to Newport, where the mother superintended the boy’s education, the Rev. Mr. Bissert instructing him in Latin. He seems to have been quick at learning but averse to study, being of a frolicsome disposition and addicted also to drawing. None remains of Stuart’s early sketches, but one day some of them were seen by Dr. William Hunter, as he was paying a professional visit to the family. The kind and discriminating physician invited the boy to call upon him, and when he came presented to him a box of paints and brushes,—a day of days in the child’s life, to be marked with red, and to be looked back upon in the after years with thanksgiving.

What a pretty picture it presents of those brave old colonial days, when simplicity and culture went hand in hand. It is very sad, of course, that the poor boy should have lived too early to enjoy the blessings of a school system, based on the strictest principles of pedagogy, graded to an average not inconveniently high, making much of words and relegating ideas to the proper limbo of things that are unpractical and, therefore, useless. How pathetic, too, the unique event of this paintbox in view of the profusion of presents which our children now enjoy! Truly, there is much room for complacent congratulation over improved conditions. Yet it is a little disconcerting to notice how much the less favoured children made of their meagre opportunities; and we may begin to wonder whether education—the leading of the child step by step to a fuller and fuller consciousness of the realities of life—and instruction—the laying of brick upon brick to build an edifice of character—may not be a thing outside of systems, and to be looked for rather in the daily contact of the child’s expanding personality with good wholesome personalities around it. Perhaps, after all, the quiet spaciousness of those old colonial days was a fine nursery for men, just as the western forests nurtured Lincoln and many a quiet home to-day is fostering the goodness and greatness of the future.

Stuart’s earliest picture is said to be a portrait of Mr. Thomas R. Hunter, of Newport, and we read that when he was thirteen years old he received a commission to paint portraits of Mr. and Mrs. John Bannister. Two years later a Scotch painter, Cosmo Alexander, arrived in Newport and interested himself in the boy’s efforts, giving him instruction, and when he returned to Scotland two years afterward, taking him with him. One notes how readily the boy ingratiated himself into the hearts of those with whom he came in contact, a trait that marks each stage of his subsequent career. He had a quiet, self-contained demeanour, with a store of spirit that could flash out enthusiastically upon occasion and in a very tactful way; with humour, too, and satire as he grew older, and with a growing brusqueness and even intolerance, toward his later life. The urbanity, discreetness, and humour he would have inherited from his Scotch father, drawing from his Welsh ancestry on the mother’s side the ardour of his character and his love of music. For his education had included the practice of music—he could play the organ and was skilful on other instruments. He must have been, indeed, a personality of rare graciousness.

The stay in Scotland was short, for Alexander died very soon after their arrival. He had established his ward in the University of Glasgow, and, dying, committed him to the care of Sir George Chambers, who himself died shortly after. The youth pined for home, and managed to get passage back to America on a collier. With a friend named Waterhouse he hired a model to study from, “a strong-muscled blacksmith.” It was characteristic of the bent of choice that reappears in his mature work: a love of strength and resolution, delighting in the robust physical qualities or in the strong evidences of mental and moral character which time has impressed upon the face.

In 1775 he again set out for Great Britain, and this time reached London. It was not until he had suffered much privation that he summoned up courage to call upon his countryman, Benjamin West. The great man was entertaining friends and not disposed to be interrupted; but the gentleman who left the party to interview the caller, found him to be a connection of friends of his in Philadelphia, and ushered him into the assemblage. The young man’s demeanour pleased West, who invited him to bring his work for inspection, admitted him as a pupil, and in 1777 installed him in his own household. By this time, besides painting under West, with Trumbull among his fellow-students, he was attending the discourses of Sir Joshua and studying anatomy in Dr. Cruikshank’s classes at the Academy. His sojourn in West’s studio extended over eight years, although during that time he was engaged on some independent work; the Duke of Northumberland, for example, sending for him to Sion House, on the Thames, to paint two portraits. From being the pupil he became the assistant of his master, until the painter Dance advised him to set up a studio of his own, which, with West’s approbation, he did in 1785.

His success was immediate; people of wit and fashion thronged his rooms; he “tasked himself to six sitters a day,” then flung his work aside and devoted himself to society, living in great splendour and spending freely. During this period he painted Louis XVI, George III, and the Prince of Wales, subsequently George IV; while among his other sitters were John Kemble, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Benjamin West. He had married Charlotte Coates, daughter of Dr. Coates of Berkshire, and with her moved, in 1788, to Dublin, where he painted many eminent people and was welcomed in society for his personal gifts. But he was eager to paint George Washington.

It is memorable that Stuart, when once his position was assured, indulged himself in the privilege of refusing many sitters. Notwithstanding his enormous expenses and the embarrassments to which they frequently led, he kept his artistic conscience intact from the smudge of mere money-making, and confined himself to those sitters who appealed to his particular temperament and afforded him the best opportunity of making a good picture. So he was willing to throw up all the golden opportunities which Europe presented, that he might have the privilege and satisfaction of painting the one man whose heroic qualities had most fascinated his imagination.

He reached New York in 1792, and two years later proceeded to Philadelphia, where Congress was in session. Establishing his studio on the southeast corner of Fifth and Chestnut streets, he painted three portraits of Washington from life. The first, which showed the right side of the face, was destroyed by the artist as not being satisfactory, and only three, or perhaps four, copies are known to exist. Then followed the full-length portrait, painted for Lord Lansdowne, which shows the left side of the face and is now in London. The third, against Washington’s own desire, was executed at the earnest solicitation of his wife and was left intentionally unfinished. This picture, which shows the left side of the face, was purchased from Stuart’s widow and presented to the Boston AthenÆum. Known as the “AthenÆum” head, it now hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and over fifty copies of it by Stuart’s hands have been traced.

Unlike Charles Willson Peale, who made, in all, fourteen portraits from life of Washington, and painted him in the prime of his vigour, Stuart depicts the late autumn of his life, when the fruitage of his activity had been gathered in; a face on which the lines of character are softened; the energy of expression mellowed; a face chastened by responsibilities; infinitely sweet and with a tender melancholy of exalted seriousness. It is the face of one who has conquered himself as well as others; it has the yearning solicitude of a father for his children; it represents him as indeed the Father of his people. The painter Leslie is quoted as having said that it was fortunate that an artist existed in the time of Washington who could hand him down to posterity looking like a gentleman; and, while the remark seems at first sound a trifle flippant, there is much in it, after all. For it is indeed the gentle qualities, those evidences in word and deed of high breeding and elevated mind, the prevailing graciousness and lofty seriousness of the true gentleman,—that rara avis among the indiscriminate flock of so-called gentlemen—that must have been preËminently distinguishable in Washington. One feels that, I think, so sensibly in visiting Mount Vernon to-day.

Set upon that fine bluff overlooking the Potomac, it has the dignity of elevation; a certain aloofness above the level, self-centred within its own appanage of outbuildings, gardens and grounds, and yet such a modest dignity, suggesting the sweet amenities, the little graces and quiet refinement of cultured country life. Certainly it is the most completely interesting memorial home of a great man anywhere to be seen, inasmuch as it is pervaded by the flavour of the old times and by the spirit of its former occupant. And the whole association of the place is of the choicest kind of gentle living. Assuredly it was a good thing that there should be an artist of the period who could record these qualities.

Stuart brought to the task a keenly comprehending mind, and a large experience in the acquaintanceship with men of affairs, of wit and learning, and brilliant, varied accomplishments. Himself a man of brilliant parts, he had ceased to be dazzled by brilliance; could look at the individual example of manhood that he was studying in its own separate perspective; could take in the complexities of his character and give a complete, instead of a fragmentary, record. Neither in his whirl of success, we may believe, had he lost touch entirely with the gentle associations that surrounded his early life. There was much in the riot of those times to hurt a sensitive susceptibility, and Stuart so often refused a sitter, or threw up a commission partly executed, that it is not unreasonable to assume that such acts were due in some measure, at least, to a certain preciosity in his own feelings. Certainly no other man of his time could have presented this fine side of Washington. West would have given a grandiloquent rendering of the hero; if not bombastic, probably theatrical; whereas it is the reticence of Stuart’s portraits that is so admirable. “I copy the works of God,” he said, “and leave clothes to tailors and mantua makers.” Without admitting the general desirableness of such a painter theory, we may acknowledge its value when tested on such a subject as Washington. We are glad to be free of the curtains and columns and all the other stock paraphernalia of the painter of the period, and to be left in uninterrupted possession of the man and nothing but the man.

Such reserve on Stuart’s part is the measure of his ranking as an artist. He worked, as he said himself, to express sentiment, grace, and character. In Washington he found all three; with many of his sitters he was less fortunate. Consequently, he is not a painter of great pictures, but of some great portraits. Yet the limitation is in a way an evidence of greatness. It was the fashion of his time to try and paint great pictures. From this he had the hardihood to separate himself, reaching with a true originality of feeling after what really interested him, the big essentials in the subjects that he studied. Thus he put himself in line with the great painters, shaking himself free of the fads and nostrums of his time, and betaking himself straight to nature. In the story of American art he holds a unique and dignified position.

The Country Life Press
Garden City, N. Y.