Volume 51, Number 19 · December 2, 2004
Making Faces
By John Updike
Gilbert Stuart
Catalog of the exhibition by Carrie Rebora Barratt and Ellen G. Miles
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 21, 2004–January 16, 2005, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., March 27–July 31, 2005
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 338 pp., $65.00; $45.00 (paper)
As a painter, Gilbert Stuart was just barely American. The son of a newly immigrant Scots snuff miller, he was born in 1755 in Rhode Island, and was soon moved to cosmopolitan Newport, a flourishing port active in the triangular trade that turned molasses into rum and rum into African slaves. The young Stuart showed precocious musical ability, and in his journeyman years often played the organ in churches to make ends meet. When he turned, in his teens, to sketching and painting, Scots artists Cosmo Alexander and his brother-in-law, Sir George Chalmers, took the young man's apprenticeship, loosely, in hand. In Alexander's care Stuart traveled, in 1771 or 1772, to Edinburgh. He returned to Newport in 1773 with enough skill to sell some stiffish portraits, echoing John Singleton Copley's literalist style, to local merchants. Then, like Copley, he sought greener, and less politically ruffled, pastures in the mother country; he arrived in London at nineteen and stayed for twelve years, becoming a successful portraitist in the glamorous, colorful, fluent English manner.
Review, 2644 words
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