The Painter's Chair

by Hugh Howard

  By 1782, Stuart was growing beyond the protégé-mentor relationship with West. According to London newspaper commentary on that year’s Royal Academy exhibition, “Mr. Stuart is in Partnership with Mr. West.” The writer, an undoubted insider with his tongue firmly in his cheek, went further: “Mr. West [says] that Mr. Stuart is the only Portrait Painter in the World; and . . . Mr. Stuart that no Man has any Pretensions in History Painting but Mr. West.”15West would remain his stalwart supporter, but Stuart was ready to become his own man.

  In the days after that show, a fellow portraitist, Nathaniel Dance, visited West’s Painting Room. He and Stuart were strangers, but Dance, a founder of the Academy and himself a portraitist, was also a man known for his candor. After an introduction by West, he observed for a time as Stuart worked at his easel. He approved of what he saw and said so. In the absence of West, Dance remarked to Stuart, “You are strong enough to stand alone . . . [T]hose who would be willing to sit to Mr. West’s pupil will be glad to sit to Mr. Stuart.”16

  Stuart didn’t have to be told twice, and soon he took rooms at 7 Newman Street, a few doors from West. Having recently married a wealthy widow, Dance was retiring his brushes and offered Stuart the contents of his studio. Stuart came to look and took only a few pencils and a palette. The palette he took had previously belonged to the portraitist Thomas Hudson, with whom Sir Joshua himself had studied.

  Stuart’s first major commission as an independent London artist came from London’s most successful print seller, John Boydell. If the assignment lacked prestige—the likes of Reynolds, Gainsborough, and George Romney would hardly have stooped to do it—Stuart needed the money. The bust-length portraits for Boydell also represented a means for Stuart to insinuate himself further into both the fabric of London artistic life and the lives of its major figures.

  There were to be fifteen canvases, and the list of the subjects was a Who’s Who of the London art scene—or, at least, of the significant circle that did business with Mr. Boydell, an entrepreneur, newly elected a London alderman, and one of the first English publishers of engravings. Eight of the subjects, in fact, were engravers in his stable, another was Boydell himself. The other six were painters, including Benjamin West, Reynolds, and Copley.

  Boydell had a gift for anticipating what the public wanted. It had been he who published The Death of General Wolfe and made a windfall profit for both Benjamin West and himself. He planned to update his store, located at 90 Cheapside, at the corner of Ironmonger Lane, in London’s most prestigious shopping neighborhood. He envisioned more than just a retail shop. Upstairs from his ground-floor sales rooms, he would open a long gallery, some eighty by seventeen feet. There he would display canvases in order to sell prints downstairs. As part of the pitch, he planned to display Stuart’s portraits of the artists and engravers whose work was represented.

  The Boydell portraits Stuart produced were informal. One was of William Woollett, the best engraver of the day and author of the mezzotint of West’s The Death of General Wolfe. Stuart portrayed him in his working attire, a voluminous red robe and velvet turban. The likeness of Woollett he produced was so effective that Stuart’s dog, Dash, who barked uncontrollably at the engraver when he came to Newman Street, growled at the portrait, too.17Stuart’s John Singleton Copley was, according to Copley’s son, “the best and most agreeable [Copley] likeness ever executed.”18He painted the aging Sir Joshua with a pinch of snuff between his thumb and forefinger. Stuart described the use of snuff as “a Pernicious, vile, dirty habit,” but he himself, like Reynolds, was addicted to the stuff.19To some, the portrayal of the grand old man of English painting might have appeared unseemly, but Sir Joshua favored the warm portrayal, as fond as it was true.

  In his paintings for Boydell, Stuart made no attempt to elevate his subjects above their station. He put a burnisher in Woollett’s hand and a metal plate on the desk before him. West had a porte-crayon in hand; behind him Stuart sketched a cartoon of Moses, an allusion to West’s biblical paintings. Stuart painted his fellow artists sitting in the same upholstered armchair. They were members of his profession, neither patrons nor aristocrats. They were his peers, and by choosing to see them in their native milieu, Stuart hoped to convey their personalities as well as their features.

  By 1786 Stuart’s income had risen to £1,500 a year—and he had reinvented himself. He rented a large London house at 3 New Burlington Street, off Regent Street, which cost him a hundred guineas a year. After the fashion of his mentor West, he transformed some of his rooms into galleries with a permanent exhibition of his own canvases. His haphazard wardrobe gave way to the showy. He had his clothes tailored, and he favored colorful waistcoats with gold buttons.

  Stuart not only looked the part of a prominent society painter; he mastered the social niceties. His friend Dr. Waterhouse, back from abroad, attested to Stuart’s social ease. “In conversation and confabulation he was inferior to no man amongst us. He made a point to keep those talking who were sitting to him for their portraits, each in their own way, free and easy . . . To military men he spoke of battles by sea and land; with the statesman, on Hume’s and Gibbon’s history; with the lawyer on jurisprudence or remarkable criminal trials; with the merchant in his way; with the man of leisure, in his way; and with the ladies, in all ways.”20He charged thirty guineas for a head-and-shoulders portrait.

  Years earlier, he had attended lectures given by Dr. William Cruik-shank, a noted anatomist. Stuart was there for artistic reasons, but most of his fellow listeners were medical students. One of them, William Coates, soon to be a navy surgeon, would bring Stuart some custom in the persons of fellow naval officers. He also took Stuart home to Berkshire, where he met Coates’s younger sister, Charlotte. Despite her apothecary father’s reluctance to permit a marriage to a painter, Gilbert and Charlotte wed in 1787. She was nineteen, a dozen years younger than he. Charlotte soon gave birth to their first child, a son they named Charles.21

  The most revealing of Stuart’s London works was the smallest, painted on a scrap of canvas barely ten inches tall. The subject was Gilbert Stuart himself. The unfinished painting bore just the ghost of a head atop a collar and a fog of scumbled pigment that suggested a shirt, all surrounded by a field of green grounding. The face is both pale and ruddy, with an ashen forehead and reddish nose and cheeks. The hair, brown and unruly, hangs over the ears. The thin lips are taut and the chin set—but it is the dark eyes, little more than shadowed slits, that give the face its brooding intensity.

  Stuart once said, “[T]he true and perfect image of man is to be seen only in a misty or hazy atmosphere.”22In a sense, his sketchy, thinly painted portrait suggests his working style (“He commenced his pictures faint, like the reflexions in a dull glass,” wrote one observer). Consisting as it does of a few dashing strokes, it also demonstrates the ease and speed with which Stuart could record with terrible accuracy the character—and in this case the torment—of the man portrayed. Whatever his own demons, he was a painter who could, in a few inspired moments, capture the emotion of a sitter.

  AFTER HIS DOZEN years in London, Stuart passed six more in Dublin. His time on Newman Street had made him a portraitist, and his practice blossomed in Ireland, making a Stuart portrait de rigueur in fashionable circles. But his improvident ways continued to undermine his success.

  An Irish friend named James Dowling Herbert—a painter and, later, a writer—recalled a pair of encounters in 1793 that anticipated Stuart’s departure for yet another city. The two men were friends, and, when in town from his farm, Stuart frequently dined at Herbert’s Dublin house. There they ate, Herbert remembered, “in the family way,” even on occasions when the great painter had received an invitation to fancier tables at grander houses. “He had all the equalizing spirit of the American,” said Herbert, “and he looked contemptuously upon titled rank.”23

  Herbert’s arrival for dinner one Sunday afternoon at Stuart’s farm in Dublin was occasioned by an encounter a few days earlier w
ith bill collectors. The two men had been walking along a Dublin street near Stuart’s in-town Painting Room when Stuart suddenly averted his face. In a low voice that Herbert could only just hear, Stuart called his attention to three men who were approaching them. They were bailiffs, he explained, who undoubtedly sought to collect upon one or more of his unpaid bills.

  Herbert became Stuart’s accomplice as they hurriedly entered Stuart’s accommodations. As Stuart instructed, Herbert remained at the front door. With the men within earshot, he called into the house, “Stuart, are you coming?” His words and apparent impatience made it appear that the two soon would walk out again. Falling for the feint, the bailiffs positioned themselves nearby to collar Stuart when he reemerged to join his friend. Inside the house Stuart made his way to a rear door and the stable. There he mounted his horse, but before riding off he could not resist calling back to his friend from a nearby corner, inquiring whether or not the three poised bailiffs were Herbert’s companions. Then, with a clap of spurs, he was gone. The would-be captors departed empty-handed.

  Before he made his escape, Stuart had issued his friend an invitation to dine the following Sunday, so a few days later Herbert made his way to Stuart’s door. Once there, he met up with Stuart’s pigs and was given a tour of the farm and Painting Room. The visitor also inquired about the bailiffs. Given the burgeoning business Stuart did in Dublin, he was perplexed.

  “You are not in debt in this country, I hope?”

  “My good friend,” said Stuart, “you are mistaken, I am deeply in debt.” Stuart then regaled him with tales of his confinements in debtors’ prison and the various means by which he had regained his freedom.

  He went on to confide the master plan he was shaping for his future, one that he hoped would help him balance his books at last.

  “I’ll get some of my first sittings finished,” he began (both men knew that meant he could then collect his half-fees). “When I can nett a sum sufficient to take me to America, I shall be off to my native soil. There I expect to make a fortune by Washington alone.” George Washington’s fame being international, Herbert could appreciate the good sense in a gifted American painter taking the General’s likeness.

  Stuart continued. “I calculate upon making a plurality of his portraits, whole lengths, that will enable me to realize; and if I should be fortunate, I will repay my English and Irish creditors. To Ireland and England I shall bid adieu.”

  Herbert, knowing something of Stuart’s pending commissions, not to mention the proposed new ones, asked, “And what will you do with your aggregate of unfinished works?”

  Stuart had an answer. “The artists of Dublin will get employed in finishing them. You may reckon on making something handsome by it, and I shan’t regret my default, when a friend is benefited by it in the end.”24

  A few months later, eighteen years after he had left, Gilbert Stuart returned to America, sailing from Dublin in March 1793.

  II.

  1793 . . . 63 Stone Street . . . Lower Manhattan

  GILBERT, CHARLOTTE, AND four little Stuarts, their worldly goods packed and ready, had planned a transatlantic journey to Philadelphia. That city had become the seat of the new government in 1791, and the painter knew he would find George Washington’s residence in the capital. But Stuart, all in a moment, decided to alter the plan.

  At the port of Dublin he learned that a traveling circus had booked passage on the same Philadelphia-bound ship. Stuart, a man whose character contained healthy measures of both whimsy and decisiveness, decided on the spot that the prospect of being cooped up for weeks on end with “horses and dancing devils and little devils” was simply too much.25Berths were soon booked on another ship, the Draper, despite the fact that it was bound for a different American destination.

  By the time they reached New York harbor, on May 6, 1793, Stuart had resolved to remain awhile in the burgeoning commercial city before proceeding to Philadelphia. He was little known in his homeland, and, though Manhattan seemed small compared to Dublin and London, Stuart thought that the island city might be just the place to establish his American reputation.

  New York’s population had more than quadrupled, to nearly sixty thousand inhabitants, in the ten years since the Revolution ended. It was a prosperous place with wealthy merchants, a well-established Hudson River aristocracy, and other rich and powerful men and women to paint. The competition posed no challenge, as Trumbull still worried his history paintings and New York had no other portraitist of note. Stuart rented a house in a reputable neighborhood filled with small merchants and tradesmen who catered to a comfortable clientele. The proprietor of one nearby business, Thomas Barrow, operated a color shop purveying the canvas, pigments, linseed oil, and other supplies Stuart would require.

  His first commission came from John Shaw, a mariner by trade. Captain Shaw was the skipper of the Draper, the large ship on which Stuart and his family had spent almost eight weeks crossing the Atlantic. The two portraits Stuart painted for the Irish-born New Yorker—one an original from life, the second a copy—were made as partial payment for their passage.26

  Although his baggage contained a portfolio of engravings, Stuart had arrived in New York without examples of his own painting. All his recent works remained across the Atlantic, in the hands of his English and Irish patrons. When he set a first blank canvas on the easel in his Painting Room, with the sounds of his four children echoing in their rented house at No. 63 Stone Street, he welcomed the opportunity to paint a ship’s captain (or just about anybody else) in order to launch his new American venture. He vowed he would soon have canvases to show.

  For once the moody Mr. Stuart painted as if in a frenzy. To suggest the range of his talent, he revisited the canine canvas of his Newport youth and painted a small, picturesque scene of three spaniels flushing woodcocks in a pretty woodland setting. His circle of acquaintances in New York was small, but he regarded John Jay as an old friend. They had known each other in London when Benjamin West had painted Jay into his unfinished The American Peace Commissioners. At that time Jay had also invited Stuart to paint two portraits of Jay himself. Stuart completed neither one and, in need of funds prior to leaving London for Dublin, had pawned them. Despite Stuart’s failings, however, Jay admired his talents. Stuart sought him out soon after arriving in the city, and Jay once more commissioned a portrait. He also extolled Stuart’s talents to other New Yorkers, as did their mutual friend John Trumbull.

  Stuart painted Chief Justice Jay, Senator Aaron Burr, and New York chancellor Robert R. Livingston, the man who had administered the oath of office to the newly elected President Washington a few years earlier. Stuart’s English and Irish connections led merchants to his door, too. Judges, wealthy visitors from Spain and Charleston, and his new clients’ wives, children, and extended families were recorded on his canvases. He painted to suit his patrons; some wanted plain, others wanted fancy. As a fellow painter who had known Stuart in London the previous decade reported, “Here [in New York] he favoured the renowned, the rich, and the fashionable, by exercising his skill for their gratification; and gave present éclat and a short-lived immortality in exchange for a portion of their wealth.”27

  One of his subjects, Horatio Gates, gave him the opportunity to practice what he had come to America to do: to paint a retired warrior, an aging military hero in whose likeness one could read the verities of war and peace. Born in England, Gates, along with George Washington, had served in General Braddock’s forces during the French and Indian War, then retired to Virginia after taking an American wife. He had been one of the first officers to offer his services to Washington in 1775. His military record in the Continental Army had been mixed (as head of the Northern Department, his forces had prevailed at the Battle of Saratoga; later, as head of the Southern Department, his army had been routed at the Battle of Camden). By 1793 the aging Gates was living in honorable retirement at Rose Hill Farm, his ninety-acre estate in central Manhattan.

  Stuart pain
ted the old military man in full regalia, sword in hand. Against the deep blue and buff uniform the general’s decorations stood out, among them the gold epaulettes with the two stars of his rank, along with a large medal commemorating the victory at Saratoga that hung from his neck on a royal blue ribbon. But what “nailed the man to canvas,” as his old mentor said of Stuart’s ability, were the head and face.

  When Gates came to Stuart’s Painting Room, the two men found they enjoyed each other’s company. Both liked their drink, and together they imbibed “glass after glass of the celebrated painter’s plentiful Madeira.”28Gates’s complexion on the canvas is flushed, his gray hair mussed, its thinning strands curling over his ears. But the gaze is clear, the expression firm. Stuart captured the man’s intelligence, his patient acceptance, his pride.

  Together with his other successes in New York, Stuart’s portrait of Gates buoyed him. The foolhardy boy who had left America at nineteen had returned with the manners of a gentleman, the melancholy look of a poet, and a distinctly roguish spirit. In his eighteen months in New York, Stuart made himself the artistic equivalent of a shooting star. As he remarked to a friend, “In England my efforts were compared to those of Vandyck, Titian and other great painters—but here! They compare them to the works of the Almighty!”29Now he was ready to go to Philadelphia to take the likeness of the new country’s greatest citizen.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Plurality of Portraits