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 George Washington | John Adams | Portrait of James Madison | Colonel Isaac Barre | Mrs. Richard Yates |
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Cornelis de Man
(Delft, 1 July 1621 - Delft, 1 September 1706) was a Dutch Golden Age painter. Kornelis was not satisfied with life in Delft. He wanted to travel beyond the port of Dordrecht and that is what he did, spending a year in Paris as soon as he came of age and had enough talent to pay his way with his painting skills. He was well-received, but set off in the Spring for Lyon in order to cross Lombardia and the mountains before another winter set in. He settled for two years in Florence, where he had a rich patron, but stayed the longest in Rome. On the way back home he stopped in Venice, and in the end was gone for a total of nine years
Alfred Stieglitz
American Photographer, 1864-1946..S. photographer and exhibitor of modern art. He was taken to Europe by his wealthy family to further his education in 1881. In 1883 he abandoned engineering studies in Berlin for a photographic career. Returning to the U.S. in 1890, he made the first successful photographs in snow, in rain, and at night. In 1902 he founded the Photo-Secession group to establish photography as an art. His own best photographs are perhaps two series (1917 C 27), one of portraits of his wife, Georgia O'Keeffe, and the other of cloud shapes corresponding to emotional experiences. His photographs were the first to be exhibited in major U.S. museums.
Pietro Cignaroli
Italian , Verona 1665-1720