Gilbert Stuart, Artist and Entertainer
The impact of Gilbert Stuart’s (1755–1828) work on American portraiture is, of course, significant. And although he is most well known for his portraits of the Founding Fathers, his character was cut of an entirely different fabric. Gilbert Stuart is shown above, circa 1825, in a portrait by Sarah Goodridge from the National Portrait Gallery's collections.
Ellen Miles, curator of paintings and sculpture at NPG says of the artist, “Everything about Stuart is interesting! He spent the (Revolutionary) war years in England, and was married to an Englishwoman. Two of their children became artists. He painted the portraits directly on canvas, as did his English contemporaries, so there are no preparatory portrait drawings by him. He returned to America when he was thirty-eight specifically to paint portraits of George Washington.”
Stuart did not confine his time solely to his artistic industry, however; he liked to entertain. In his autobiography, Irish Varieties (1836), painter J. D. Herbert tells of Stuart’s legendary dinners when he lived near Dublin, Ireland in 1787-93:
He had a splendid house, and lived expensively. Amongst other servants, he kept a French cook. He began giving dinners, and invited forty-two persons to dine with him. Those were men of talent in some professional line—painters, poets, musicians, droll fellows, actors, and authors. After dinner he said to his friends, “I can’t have you all every day, but I will have seven of you to dine with me each day in the week; and I have contrived it so that the party shall vary without further trouble. I have put up seven cloak pins in my hall, so as the first seven that come may hang up their cloaks and hats; the eighth man, seeing these full, will go away, and probably attend earlier on the next day. Then it would not be likely that any one of the party of one day would come on the next, nor until the time for the forty-two should be expended; and Sunday should be excepted.” This compact was understood, and without trouble naming or writing, (he) had a different company every day, and no jealousies at a preference given to anyone.
Stuart’s extravagances took their toll on his income. In her book The Genius of Gilbert Stuart, NPG senior fellow Dr. Dorinda Evans states that, “He seemed to enjoy occupying a central position in what he deemed a ridiculous situation... He relished the tale of his finally submitting in 1789 to imprisonment for debt in Dublin’s Marshalsea Prison, where, to his glee, he received a constant succession of prominent and serious citizens who wished to have their portraits painted.”
Perhaps another irony Stuart would appreciate is the fact that although he struggled with debt, it is his image of George Washington that graces our dollar bill.
The centerpiece of NPG’s “America’s Presidents” gallery is Stuart’s “Lansdowne” image of George Washington (above), and that portrait’s origin is as paradoxical as its artist. “It was painted for an Englishman who was sympathetic to the goals of the American Revolution,” states Miles.
Gilbert Stuart/Sarah Goodridge, c.1825/Watercolor on ivory/National Portrait Gallery
George Washington (Lansdowne portrait)/Gilbert Stuart, 1796/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery; acquired as a gift to the nation through the generosity of the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation
Why does a museum that usually exhibits art choose to exhibit posters? How do you characterize a poster anyway? Is it high culture when done by a fine artist and low culture when it reproduces a photographic face? Is it an historical document, an inexpensive decorative item, a symbol, or an ephemeral piece of commerce?
The poster is a familiar part of our world, and we intuitively understand its role as propaganda, promotion, announcement, or advertisement. But in this exhibition, we’ve added another set of questions to ponder. How can we think about the poster as a form of popular portraiture? So often a poster does feature a famous face. And when it does, it is conveying information about that individual, while at the same time announcing the arrival of a circus, hawking a product, building wartime morale, or promoting a movie or political movement. What are those messages about the celebrity figure? Does the poster reinforce his or her public image? Undermine it? Subtly transform it? How does each poster express a specific moment in the life of the person depicted? 
John Paul Jones, acclaimed in Paris after his spectacular victory in the August 23, 1779, ship-to-ship duel between the Bonhomme Richard and the British ship Serapis, was, detailed an Englishwoman on the scene, “greatly admired here especially by the ladies who are wild with love for him, but he adores Lady_____.” The lady in question was the twenty-six-year-old Comtesse de Lowendahl, the wife of a French brigadier general, who was “possessed of youth, beauty and wit, and every other female accomplishment.” The Comtesse was fond of music and poetry and painting miniatures of her friends: “She drew his picture (a striking likeness) . . . and presented it to him.” (shown above)
Conducting research for the exhibition “
I have always been drawn to the beauty of well-crafted platinum prints, and these two photographs became two of my favorite works in the exhibition. Yet when it came time to write something about the pictures for the catalogue, I was struck by the paucity of information about Ben-Yusuf. No one seemed to know for certain when she was born, when she came to America, and what prompted her to pursue photography. At the time, I struggled to write labels for these two prints and ultimately had to dedicate most of my text to the subjects of these portraits.
As Zaida Ben-Yusuf (right) is such a distinctive name, records of her contributions—and her mother’s—appeared with remarkable ease in these databases. Perhaps not surprisingly, editors frequently misspelled her name, and it was at times amusing to see how her pictures were credited in newspaper and magazine captions. In an earlier moment—when microfilm was king—it would have been impossible to locate as many different items as I did. Indeed, the recovery of Ben-Yusuf’s life was made possible by these new technologies.
Among the recent acquisitions placed on view at the 
Although Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” provides the reader with a wonderfully dramatic setting in which our hero rides out of Boston to warn the colonists in Lexington and Concord of the impending British march, there is a disparity between the poetic narrative and the facts of April 18, 1775. History and Longfellow (right) run pretty much parallel until Revere rides into Lexington. Longfellow writes:
So, other than the fictitious account of Paul Revere’s ride handed down to us by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, why do we hold Revere in such acclaim? “Paul Revere is sometimes underestimated,” says Patrick Leehey, research director for the 
April is 
April 15 connotes a day of great civic participation in American government; it is the day, of course, income taxes come due as stipulated by the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1913 during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. 
Of tragic note on this date, Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 in the morning of April 15, 1865, after having been shot by the actor and southern fire-eater John Wilkes Booth on the previous evening. On the night of the 14th, Lincoln and his wife had gone to Ford’s Theatre to see a production of Our American Cousin with the actress Laura Keene as the main attraction. 
In the pandemonium that followed, Booth escaped, despite having broken his leg when landing on stage. When Lincoln died, allegedly Edwin Stanton uttered the phrase, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Booth was tracked into southern Maryland and shot to death on April 26.
Not often on view because of the fragility of the pastel medium is NPG’s portrait of John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), executed by the German artist Izaac Schmidt in July 1783. The National Portrait Gallery has many other representations of Adams—showing him as a diplomat, as the sixth president of the United States, and especially as “Old Man Eloquent” of the House of Representatives—but this small drawing, done during the month in which Adams turned sixteen, has the distinction of being his earliest known likeness.
Adams gave the original portrait to his sister Nabby, and later had a copy made for his wife Louisa Catherine, pointing out that he appeared in his “best coat and powdered hair.” When he was sixty-four (the age the Beatles sang about), Adams, contemplating his young self, observed, “And they who look at the bald head, the watery eye, and the wrinkled brow of this day, would search in vain for the strong likeness which it was said to exhibit when it was taken.”
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