The Painter's Chair

by Hugh Howard

  At first Stuart established his Painting Room in a rented house on Pill Lane. The neighborhood was respectable, near the Liffey and not so far from another of the city’s impressive new buildings, the immense legal edifice known as the Four Courts. He shared the house with his family, but he threw himself into his work and a gregarious social life that his temperament and his profession seemed to demand. They lived, it was said, in a very good style. Stuart was a voracious consumer of good food, drink, and conversation. He liked nothing more than to entertain guests with his wife’s lovely contralto singing voice, and he often accompanied her on his flute. The daughter of a Berkshire apothecary, Charlotte Coates Stuart was pretty and intelligent and a fervent believer in her husband’s talents.

  His patrons included the new lord chancellor of Ireland, for whom he executed a life-size canvas, portraying the regal ruler in the style of royal portraiture, with his mace, luxuriant robes, and other symbols of power.

  In Stuart’s newfound home, the commissions had come from the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, the ruling class dominated by the British and a mix of old Protestant Irish families (under the Penal Laws, no Catholic was permitted to vote, hold office, or own land). The city’s elite inhabited the spacious downtown squares, living in new row houses fronted by doorways with sweeping fanlights. Visitors climbed to the second floor, the piano nobile, to find spaces decorated with fine stucco work applied by Italian artisans. At some of the better addresses, original Stuart portraits soon hung. More than a few of his old London clients had large land holdings in Ireland, so Stuart’s renown preceded him. The very year he left England’s capital, one of that city’s newspapers had labeled him “The Vandyke of the Time.”2

  According to a painter friend, everyone who was anyone in Dublin wanted a Stuart, as “a rage to possess some specimen of his pencil took place.”3He had no peer in Ireland’s capital; aspiring younger painters sought his guidance, and older lesser artists moved elsewhere. His commissions were numerous, and at first the half-fees he collected from his sitters (monies were paid in advance) made possible his gracious lifestyle. Within two years of his arrival, however, he was cast into Marshalsea Prison in the summer of 1789. Unlike his friend John Trumbull, incarcerated for treason a few years earlier, Stuart found himself in a debtors’ prison, his obligations having far exceeded his income. Even so, the spirited Stuart remained undaunted, turning his time in jail to advantage. Just as Trumbull had done, he set up his easel. He welcomed “men of wealth and fashion . . . who wanted portraits from his hand,” and, after he had collected enough half-fees to clear his outstanding debt, he regained his freedom, at least for a time. He liked to tell the story of another episode in another prison when, having painted both the jailer and his wife, he was set free by the grateful sitter.

  Stuart’s spirits could change like the tides of the Irish Sea; when “in the humor,” he painted with great verve, but at other times his temperament varied from the manic to the depressed.4

  Given the chance to try living in a village on Dublin’s outskirts, Stuart had packed up his family and started afresh. At Stillorgan Park the Stuart family’s cottage was located on an estate owned by the Earl of Carysfort, an English nobleman and a friend of Sir Joshua. Stuart was away from the everyday temptations of Dublin but close enough that, by taking the short walk down a narrow lane to the inn at Black Rock, he could travel the several miles to Dublin in a public coach. There he maintained a Painting Room for the convenience of the Dublin customers on whom his livelihood depended.

  From the high ground of his acres in Stillorgan, Stuart could take in the waterscape around him. This rural interlude was among the happiest times in his life, but Mr. Stuart could hardly deny that it would soon be necessary to move on once more. His ever-growing debts were one consideration; so was his emerging dream of creating a great painting that would make his penurious past merely a memory.

  THE SMELL OF salt air was well known to Gilbert Stuart. By birth he was a Rhode Islander, a child of the tiny colony of islands with a mile of coastline for every three of land area. The sound of freshwater rushing by had accompanied Stuart’s early years, along with the creaks and groans of an undershot waterwheel. That wheel drove the milling machine in the family’s downstairs kitchen, its wooden teeth and gears grinding tobacco into snuff.

  He was the namesake of his father, Gilbert Stuart of Perth, who had come from Scotland in 1751 to establish the first snuff manufactory in America. Gilbert the younger was born in the mill house in 1755 and lived in the wood-framed homestead on the banks of the Mattatuxet Brook until Gilbert, age five, his older sister, Ann, and their parents moved to nearby Newport.

  The business of making snuff proved disappointing once the growth of transatlantic trade made snuff cheaper to import than to produce. A small inheritance from a maternal relative enabled the Stuarts to move to Newport, and their means were sufficient that they owned two slaves (a mother and child) and enough land to maintain a garden and livestock. Gilbert the elder set up shop on Banister’s Wharf, where his wares included mustard flour, earthenware cups, writing paper, hats, shoe buckles, linen, silk, and sewing supplies.5The parents rented a pew at Trinity Church, and the boy learned his reading, writing, and sums under the tutelage of the clergy at Trinity’s grammar school. His scholarship was unremarkable (he was, said a childhood friend, “a very capable, self-willed boy . . . habituated at home to have his own way in everything with little or no control from the easy, good-natured father”).6The young Gilbert excelled as a musician. As a pupil of the church’s organist, a disciplined German named Johann Ernst Knotchell, he mastered the pipe organ.

  Gilbert began drawing at an early age, too, thanks in part to rudimentary instructions provided by an African slave named Neptune Thurston. When Stuart was barely into his teens, he painted a likeness of two spaniels for a local physician, who, recognizing the boy’s ability to draw, provided him with painting materials. The animals were posed beneath another of Dr. Hunter’s proud possessions, a fine locally made side table in the house’s handsomely appointed parlor. The doctor engaged a second artist at the same time to paint portraits of people, and Stuart made the acquaintance of the itinerant Scots artist Cosmo Alexander. He hired on as his apprentice. From his master he learned to grind and mix pigments, lay out a palette, prepare canvases, and wash brushes. This training provided Stuart’s first “lessons in the grammar of the art . . . [of] drawing—and the groundwork of the palette.”7

  The son of an artist (his first name honored one of his father’s patrons, the Tuscan Grand Duke Cosimo III), Cosmo Alexander had trained in Italy and was well connected in London. With Stuart in tow, the worldly artist soon embarked on travels to Philadelphia; Norfolk and Williamsburg, Virginia; Charleston, South Carolina; and thence overseas to Edinburgh. The apprenticeship ended prematurely after less than three years with Alexander’s sudden death in Scotland. For a time Stuart continued his training in Glasgow with another painter, Alexander’s brother-in-law, Sir George Chalmers, and he briefly attended university there. By the fall of 1773 he made his way back to America and began producing portraits on his own.

  Not yet eighteen, Stuart wrestled with his talent, learning from every exposure to other artists. His father’s onetime partner in the snuff business, Thomas Moffatt, was John Smibert’s nephew. It seems that the connection enabled Stuart to visit the deceased Smibert’s color shop (and the Painting Room above), then being operated by Smibert’s widow and John Moffatt. Along the way, Stuart studied engravings based on the work of Eu rope an masters. As others before him had done, he recognized that such images were models from which to borrow poses, pictorial composition, and miscellaneous details.

  During these years Stuart’s eye also fell upon the work of John Singleton Copley, then the artist of Boston. Copley’s portraiture incorporated lovingly painted clothing, furniture, and other objects, but all very much in the service of inner dramas that seemed to be unfolding on the canvas. Stuart, too, began incorpor
ating props—not merely costumes but books and quill pens and furniture as well—and he labored to capture his subjects in midgesture. Instead of depicting them as if frozen in place before his easel, he sought to create the illusion that these people were going about their business. His sitters’ faces glowed. Far from being imprisoned by their pictures, their eyes looked beyond, their expressions vital, curious, and thoughtful. The crude and wooden people of his early paintings were transformed into alive and engaging characters.

  When the nineteen-year-old painter felt ready to record the ruling class, he witnessed first hand the strength of the revolutionary winds swirling through the colonies. Stuart was in Boston in April 1775 when word reached the city of the opening battles of the war in nearby Lexington and Concord. A few days later, when the same news reached Philadelphia, the Continental Congress began the debate on who should lead the volunteer army that was assembling near Boston. The friction between Loyalists and Patriots in New England threatened every transaction conducted by merchants and artisans, and potential patrons had already begun to scatter. John Singleton Copley had left the growing divisions behind when he sailed for London almost a year earlier, and by the summer of 1775, Stuart’s Tory father, mother, and sister were gone, too, settling on property they owned in the safety of the royal province of Nova Scotia. Left alone in Newport, Stuart recognized that the call for portraits, never an essential, could only diminish in the war that had now begun. The youthful artist made a pragmatic decision.

  For years he had talked of his ardent desire to visit London and, lacking the sense of revolutionary outrage that animated many of his American friends, he decided it was time to go. He refused an opportunity to paint a full-length portrait of one of Newport’s most influential men, Abraham Redwood, found er of the town’s Redwood Library. By September he had sailed for London aboard the Flora.

  Stuart would not return to America during the Revolution or for another decade thereafter. In his absence, the man who arrived in Boston to assume command of the Continental Army in 1775 rose to become the lodestar of the Republic. The first meeting of the General and his most important portraitist would occur only after the passage of another two decades.

  GILBERT STUART’S EARLY days in London could hardly have been less encouraging. He had no particular plan, little money, and a single letter of introduction. On reaching the city, in November 1775, he discovered that the one friendly face he expected to see, his old schoolmate from Newport, Benjamin Water house, had recently decamped for medical school in Edinburgh. Stuart’s ill-conceived notion of making his living as a painter in a city full of artists quickly proved unrealistic. His customers were few and his fees so small that they barely paid for his daily bread.8

  For a time, another of his talents helped to keep him solvent. A few months after his arrival Stuart was already in arrears to the landlord at his cheap lodgings over a tailor’s shop. He rambled through the city, his pockets empty and his desperation rising. One day as he walked along Foster Lane, he was drawn by the familiar sound of an organ. Though the majestic dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral was within sight, the music he heard emerged from the more modest St. Catherine’s Church. Stuart had no pennies to spare for the pew-woman’s fee, but he ventured to inquire what occasion was being celebrated. None at all, he was told; rather, the vestrymen were present to judge candidates for the position of church organist. Despite his youth and shabby attire, he talked his way into an audition and won the position, along with a salary of thirty pounds per annum. The temptation to pursue his musical talents was great (he took flute lessons in those months from a German member of the king’s band), and, for a time, he “lived on biscuit & music.”9

  His pursuit of a painting career gained new momentum with the return to London of his childhood friend that summer. Through Benjamin Waterhouse, Stuart gained a new source of commissions, and he began painting portraits of his friend’s scientific colleagues. The two expatriate Americans also devoted a day each week to seeing London’s sights. They favored the pictures in the Royal Collection at Buckingham House above the rest. Waterhouse, who knew him better than anyone, saw in Stuart the unpredictability that had led him to refuse the Redwood commission back in Newport. He left some of his London commissions unfinished and failed even to begin others. “With Stuart it was either high tide or low tide,” Waterhouse observed. “In London he would sometimes lay abed for weeks, waiting for the tide to lead him on to fortune.”10The painter became dependent upon Waterhouse, but his friend had neither sufficient means to maintain him nor the influence to get him to mend his ways.

  Stuart himself finally managed to identify the necessary agent of change and wrote an uncharacteristically humble—even, groveling— letter. One meandering sentence of the undated inquiry, its syntax as tortured as the ego of the man who composed it, sums up its author’s plight:

  Pitty me Good Sir I’ve just arriv’d att the age of 21 an age when most young men have done something worthy of notice & find myself Ignorant without Business or Friends, without the necessarys of life so far that for some time I have been reduc’d to one miserable meal a day & frequently not even that, destitute of the means of acquiring knowledge, my hopes from home blasted &incapable of returning thither, pitching headlong into misery I have only this hope I pray that it may not be too great, to live &learn without being Burthen.11

  Sent from his friend Waterhouse’s rooms at 30 Gracechurch Street, the supplicating letter produced a change of fortune. Its recipient, Mr. Benjamin West, welcomed Stuart to his Painting Rooms. With Water-house’s departure for the University of Leyden to complete his medical studies (he would find lodging there in the home of John Adams, then American minister to the Netherlands), Stuart took up painting draperies for West. More than Neptune Thurston and Cosmo Alexander, this painter, teacher, and mentor would provide Stuart with the opportunity he needed to make himself into a painter with a reputation for likeness.

  FOR FIVE YEARS, Stuart worked at West’s Painting Rooms at 14 Newman Street. At first, his work as a drapery painter was rewarded with half a guinea a week and, upon occasion, he posed for his master. After a time, he earned the privilege of making copies of some of West’s paintings, and was also assigned to work on subsidiary elements in West’s large-scale history pictures.

  As a result of West’s influence, a painting by Stuart of an unnamed woman hung in the 1777 annual exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. Three more Stuart canvases were accepted for the 1779 show, but the newspapers made no mention of the young American. Then, in 1781, his portrait of West was singled out by the press. “An excellent portrait,” observed the reviewer in the St. James’s Chronicle, “I do not know a better one in the room.”12Given the presence of pictures by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds in the same gallery, this was high praise indeed.

  Stuart attended Sir Joshua’s “Discourses on Art,” a series of lectures given at the Royal Academy of Arts, but he did not attempt to join the Academy. If he had used West’s influence to become a member, he might have enrolled in drawing classes. Instead, he worked at developing a style that was peculiarly his own. “Drawing the features distinctly and carefully with chalk [is a] loss of time,” he observed. “All studies [should] be made with brush in hand.”13

  When Stuart regarded his sitters, he didn’t see lines; he saw three-dimensional forms that he could better render in colors and tones. He started with the face, but not by underpainting in neutral tones. He began with pigmented oils, though his faces were thinly painted, almost translucent. Elsewhere on the canvas he began to apply more paint, raking it with his palette knife and leaving the thicker pigment to suggest fabrics rather than to re-create precisely the sheen and textures. The colors he used for his sitters’ faces (the rosy pinks, soft orange, and creamy yellow) weren’t blended on the canvas into a uniform complexion. Instead the viewer’s eyes had the task of melding the pigments. When he worked for West, he painted as West did, but he employed a more painterly style on hi
s own works.

  Just how far Stuart had progressed became clear to both men one day in West’s Painting Room. As painter to the king West was periodically obliged to provide a portrait of the monarch, and on this particular occasion a likeness was required for the new governor-general of India, whose ship was soon to set sail. His energies occupied with what Stuart called one of his “ten-acre pictures,” West decided upon a shortcut. He asked Stuart if he might have a canvas his protégé had completed of the king. “I will retouch it,” explained West, “and it will do well enough.” Stuart resented being condescended to, but the canvas was duly delivered to West’s personal Painting Room.

  According to Stuart, West worked at it for an entire day. The result did not please him, so the following morning he asked for Stuart’s palette, complete with Stuart’s choice of colors, and went to work on the canvas once more. “In the afternoon,” Stuart reported, “I went into his room and . . . I saw that he had got up to his knees in mud. ‘Stuart,’ says he, ‘I don’t know how it is, but you have a way of managing your tints unlike every body else,—here,—take the palette and finish the head.’ ”14