1755-1828 Gilbert Stuart was born in North Kingston, R.I., on Dec. 3, 1755. At the age of 13 or 14 he studied art with the Scottish painter Cosmo Alexander in Newport. With Alexander he made a tour of the South and a journey to Edinburgh, where Alexander died in 1772. For about a year Stuart remained, poverty-stricken, in Scotland, but finally, working as a sailor, he managed to get back to America. There he executed a few portraits in a hard limner fashion. With the Revolutionary War threatening, his family, who had Tory sympathies, fled to Nova Scotia, and Stuart sailed for London, where he remained from 1775 to 1787. For the first 4 or 5 years, Stuart served as the first assistant of American expatriate painter Benjamin West, who had rescued him from poverty. From the first, Stuart showed an interest only in portraiture and had no desire to go into the branch of history painting West practiced. After his apprenticeship, Stuart became London's leading portrait painter, next to Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, whose style he emulated, as in a rare full-length portrait of William Grant of Congalton as The Skater (ca. 1782). For a while Stuart lived in splendor, but being a bad businessman and a profligate spender, he was in constant debt. He lived in Ireland from 1787 to 1792 and then returned to America to make a fortune,  Related Paintings of Gilbert Stuart :. | Portrait of Don Jose de Jaudenes y Nebot | Portrait of Robert R. Livingston | WashingtonAtDorchesterHeightsByStuart | Anna Payne Cutts | the skater |
Related Artists:
Ramon Bayeu
1746-1793 Spanish Ramon Bayeu Gallery The biography of Jose del Castillo (Madrid, 14.10.1737-Madrid, 5.10.1793) shows that the artist, being in his youth one of the most appropriate painters for becoming a leader of the artistic movement of the Illustrious Absolutism, ends up performing secondary work, paintings for tapestry and some religious works of art, which was not the field where he could best display his talent. Jose del Castillo is a perfect example of how an unhappy destiny can influence on the professional life of a painter under the regime of that time. Surely the unhappy destiny, in point of fact, does not explain anything and we will have to find out the real reasons why one of the most promising careers in painting of the eighteenth century in Spain was crushed. Probably it was a combination of two unsuccessful elections, from our point of view, that excluded the figure of Jose del Castillo from the elite group of artists of that time.
Antonio Maria Esquivel
Nacio en Sevilla en 1806. Comenzo los estudios de pintura en la Academia de Bellas Artes de Sevilla. Alli se familiarizo con la tecnica pictorica y el detallismo al estilo de Murillo. En 1831, se traslado a Madrid, donde concurso en la Academia de San Fernando, siendo nombrado academico de merito. En contacto con el ambiente intectual madrileno de esos anos, participo activamente en la fundacion del Liceo Artistico y Literario en 1837, donde daria clases de Anatomia, asignatura que impartiria tambien mas tarde en la Academia de San Fernando. En 1839, otra vez en Sevilla, sufrio una enfermedad que le dejo practicamente ciego; el artista, sumido en una profunda depresion, se intento suicidar arrojandose al rio Guadalquivir. Enterados sus companeros y amigos poetas y artistas y movilizados por el Liceo para ayudarle, sufragaron entre todos un caro tratamiento realizado por un prestigioso oftalmologo frances. Gracias a esto, en 1840 sano y recupero la vision. El artista, agradecido, pinto a sus amigos, poetas y pintores del Romanticismo, en un cuadro que se ha hecho justamente celebre. Como reconocimientos oficiales, recibo la placa del Sitio de Cadiz y la Cruz de Comendador de la Orden de Isabel la Catolica. En 1843 es nombrado Pintor de Camara y en 1847 academico de San Fernando, siendo ademas miembro fundador de la Sociedad Protectora de Bellas Artes. Como teorico de la pintura, redacto un Tratado de Anatomia Pictorica, cuyo original se guarda en el Museo del Prado. Fallecio en Madrid en 1857. Sus hijos Carlos Maria (1830-1867) y Vicente tambien fueron pintores.
Ludomir Benedyktowicz
(August 5, 1844 - December 14, 1926) was a Polish painter.