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 :. | The Skater | Portrait of John Randolph | Colonel Isaac Barre | Portrait of Elizabeth Chipman Gray | Portrait of Connecticut politician and governor Oliver Wolcott, |
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MARIESCHI, Michele
Italian Painter, 1710-1743 Italian painter and engraver. His first biographers, Orlandi and Guarienti (1753), stated that Marieschi worked in Germany early in his career and then returned to Venice, where he established himself as a painter of 'beautiful views of the Grand Canal, and of churches and palaces'. Yet there is no other evidence for this journey and Marieschi's early training remains problematic. It seems likely that he began his career as a stage designer: his first recorded activity, in 1731, was the preparation, on behalf of the impresario Francesco Tasso ( fl 1725-c. 1740), of the setting for the Venetian celebration of Carnival Thursday in the Piazzetta. He then, influenced by Marco Ricci and Luca Carlevaris, began to paint capriccios and vedute. His early capriccios, such as the pair Capriccio with Classical Ruins and Bridge and Capriccio with Roman Arch and Encampment (mid-1730s; Naples, Mus. Civ. Gaetano Filangieri), are indebted to Ricci, although they lack his solemnity and magnificence. Marieschi's blend of medieval and Classical ruins in a serene Venetian landscape is more picturesque and romantic. Marieschi began to paint vedute having been encouraged by Canaletto's great success with the genre; examples such as the S Maria della Salute (1733-5; Paris, Louvre), the Piazzetta dei Leoni and the Grand Canal at Ca' Pesaro (1734-5; both Munich, Alte Pin.) are distinguished from Canaletto's work by their exaggerated perspective, more atmospheric colour and the spirited handling of the small figures. Two capriccios, the Town on a River with Rapids (London, N.G.) and the Town on a River with Shipping (London, N.G.;.), both charmingly picturesque scenes with watermills and crumbling towers, date from the mid-1730s. Marieschi began to etch in the 1730s,
MAINO, Fray Juan Bautista
Spanish Baroque Era Painter, 1578-1649
jan massys
1509-1575