“Another King arose which knew not Joseph,” and so it goes still. Most American children are familiar with the so-called “Athenæum Portrait of George Washington,” yet probably very few, even of their parents, know the name of the artist, Gilbert Stuart. We have got into the habit of dating the growth of modern American painting from 1875, and with some reasonableness, for that was the period at which students began to arrive home from Munich and Paris in sufficient numbers to make their arrival felt. Yet twenty-five years earlier, about the time that George Inness was starting for Europe, William M. Hunt had returned, bringing with him pictures of the Barbizon painters and introducing their principles of nature study. We are apt to dismiss the painting of the previous half-century as representing only the draggled ends of the English influence rudely severed by the Revolution; forgetting that the period is linked on to the Augustan age of English painting, to Reynolds, Gainsborough, and the somewhat later Constable. For Gilbert Stuart was a contemporary of all three, and to some extent a rival of Reynolds, even in London, and was born also within the lifetime of the first of the great Englishmen, William Hogarth. Stuart, moreover, was not a follower of others, but a distinct and forceful individuality that played a leading rôle in the stirring drama of his times. He was, with little doubt, the first of American masters of painting.
There is a romance in every life, however gray and level, but in Stuart’s the romance foamed upon the surface. Perhaps he had inherited it; for his father, a native of Perth, in Scotland, reached this country shortly after the battle of Culloden Moor, that shattered the prospects of the Pretender; and there is more than a suspicion that his espousal of a lost cause had made it well to put the ocean between himself and his past. However that may be, he built himself a little mill with a gambrel roof, at the head of the Petaquamscott Pond, in Narragansett county, R.I., and settled down to the quiet occupation of grinding snuff. He had married, and in 1755, after several other children, came a boy, who received the name of his father, and was duly entered in the baptismal registry as “son of the snuff grinder.” But in time the mill proved unprofitable, and the family migrated to Newport, where the mother superintended the boy’s education, the Rev. Mr. Bissert instructing him in Latin. He seems to have been quick at learning but averse to study, being of a frolicsome disposition and addicted also to drawing. None remains of Stuart’s early sketches, but one day some of them were seen by Dr. William Hunter, as he was paying a professional visit to the family. The kind and discriminating physician invited the boy to call upon him, and when he came presented to him a box of paints and brushes,--a day of days in the child’s life, to be marked with red, and to be looked back upon in the after years with thanksgiving.