Gilbert Stuart

Stuart, Gilbert 

Born Dec. 3, 1755, in Narragansett, R.I.; died July 9, 1828, in Boston. American painter.

Stuart first studied with C. Alexander in 1769 and lived and worked in Great Britain and Ireland from 1773 to 1792. One of the founders of the American portrait school, Stuart embodied in his work the ideas of the progressive bourgeois enlightenment of the period of the liberation struggle of the British colonies in North America. His best portraits, such as The Skater (portrait of W. Grant, 1782) and George Washington (1795)—both in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.—are marked by a mastery of psychological analysis, strict truthfulness, and a natural character portrayal.

REFERENCES

Iur’eva, T. S. “Gilbert Stiuart i amerikanskaia portretnaia zhivopis’ XVIII stoletiia.” In the collection Problemy razvitiia zarubezhnogo iskusstva, issue 4. Leningrad, 1974. Pages 53–59.
Flexner, J. T. Gilbert Stuart. New York, 1955.