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 :. | George Washington | Portrait of John Randolph | John Bill Ricketts, also identified as, Breschard, the Circus Rider | Portrait of George Washington | Joseph Brant |
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Julia Margaret Cameron
British Photographer, 1815-1879,English pioneer photographer, b. Calcutta (now Kolkata). Born and married into the high ranks of the British civil service, Cameron became an intimate of many of the most famous people of her day. In 1864 she became an ardent amateur photographer, demanding long, arduous sittings from her illustrious friends. She sought to illuminate the inner person of her subject, and her celebrated portraits, including those of Tennyson, Carlyle, Ellen Terry, Browning, Darwin, and Longfellow, are remarkably spontaneous. She also pioneered the use of closeups,
rudolph von alt
Rudolf Ritter von Alt (28 August 1812 in Vienna ?C 12 March 1905 in Vienna) was an Austrian landscape and architectural painter. Borne as Rudolf Alt, he could call himself von Alt and bear the title of a Ritter (knight) after he gained nobility in 1882. He was the son of the famous lithographer Jakob Alt (1789-1872). He studied at the Akademie der bildenden K??nste in Vienna. Hiking-trips through the Austrian Alps and northern Italy awoke a love for landscapes, and he painted with his brush using watercolors in a very realistic and detailed style. In 1833, inspired by a visit to Venice and neighbouring cities, he also made a number of architectural paintings. Alt demonstrated a remarkable talent for expressing certain peculiarities in nature. He managed to paint nature authentically by focusing on the different hues of sky, the colour-tone of the air and the vegetation. His later works came closer to Impressionism. His perspectives on architecture were interesting, and he often chose everyday objects to paint. The painting of interior-views also became one of his strong points, giving him attention in Vienna. He visited and worked for a while in Rome and Naples; after that he visited the lakes of Lombardy, then Galicia, Bohemia, Dalmatia, Bavaria and then returned multiple times to Italy. In 1863 he went to the Crimea to paint some views of an estate of the Empress, and in 1867 he went to Sicily. His younger brother Franz Alt, (b. 1821 in Vienna) was also a painter. Most of his paintings are held by various museums in Vienna. The Albertina in Vienna hosted a retrospective exhibition from September 2005 to January 2006.
queen victoria
Born: 24 May 1819 Birthplace: London, England Died: 22 January 1901 (cerebral hemorrhage) Best Known As: The queen who reigned for 64 years