Read The Painter's Chair Online
Authors: Hugh Howard
The Painter's Chair (23 page)
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.”
10
The 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.”
12
Given 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 his 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
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.”
15
West 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.
17
Stuart’s John Singleton Copley was, according to Copley’s son, “the best and most agreeable [Copley] likeness ever executed.”
18
He 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.
19
To 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.