Read The Painter's Chair Online
Authors: Hugh Howard
The Painter's Chair (24 page)
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.”
20
He 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.”
22
In 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
with 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.
25
Berths 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.
