GILBERT CHARLES STUART. In this biographical sketch of the life and character of GILBERT C. STUART, we shall avail ourselves of the very valuable information afforded us by the late venerable Dr. Benj. Waterhouse, of Cambridge, the companion of his childhood and his youth, and the undeviating friend of his manhood and age; and of such other sources of information as are offered to us. Although our greatest portrait painter died but in 1828, already the place of his nativity is disputed, and contending towns claim the honor of producing this extraordinary genius; to Dr. Waterhouse we owe certainty on this head; and even the time of his birth would not have been accurately determined, but that the painter has inscribed "G. Stuart, Pictor, se ipso pinxit, A. D. 1778, Etatis sua 24," on a portrait painted by himself and presented to his friend, which remains a monument of his early skill, and is the more precious as it is the only portrait he ever painted of himself. This, of course, gives us the year of his birth, 1754. Between the years 1746 and 1750, there came over from Great Britain to these English colonies a number of Scotch gentlemen, who had not the appearance of what is generally understood by the term emigrants, nor yet merchants or gentlemen of fortune. They came not in companies, but dropped in quietly, one after another. Their unassuming appearance and retired habits, bordering on the reserve, seemed to place them above the common class of British travellers. Their mode of life was snug, discreet, and respectable, yet clannish. Some settled in Philadelphia, some in Perth Amboy, some in New York; but a greater proportion sat down at that pleasant and healthy spot, Rhode Island, called by its first historiographer, Callender," the Garden of America." Several of the emigrants were professional men; among these was Dr. Thomas Moffat, a learned physician of the Boerhaavean school; but, however learned, his dress and manners were so ill suited to the plainness of the inhabitants of Rhode Island, who were principally Quakers, that he could not make his way among them as a practitioner, and therefore he looked round for some other mode of genteel subsistence; and he hit upon that of cultivating tobacco and making snuff, to supply the place of the great quantity that was every year imported from Glasgow; but he could find no man in the country who he thought was able to make him a snuff mill. He therefore wrote to Scotland, and obtained a competent mill-wright, by the name of Gilbert Stuart. Dr. Moffat selected for his mill seat a proper stream in that part of the colony of Rhode Island and Providence plantations which bore and still bears the Indian name of Narraganset, once occupied by the warlike tribe of the Pequot Indians, made familiar to us by the intensely interesting romance of our novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, under the title of the "Last of the Mohicans." There, Gilbert Stuart, the father of the great painter, erected the first snuff mill in New England, and there he manufactured that strange article of luxury. He soon after built a house, and married a very handsome woman, daughter of a Mr. Anthony, a substantial farmer; and of this happy couple, at Narraganset, was born GILBERT CHARLES STUART; So christened, but the middle name, which betokens the jacobite principles of his father, was early dropped by the son, and never used in his days of notoriety; indeed, but for the signatures of letters addressed to his friend Waterhouse in youth, we should have no evidence that he ever bore more than the famous name of GILBERT STUART. a very He is described to us by one of his school fellows as capable, self-willed boy; handsome, forward, an only son, and habituated at home to have his own way in every thing, with little or no control of the easy, good natured father." He was about thirteen years old when he began to copy pictures, and at length attempted likenesses in black lead. There came to Newport about the year 1772, a Scotch gentleman named Cosmo Alexander; he was between fifty and sixty years of age, of delicate health, and prepossessing manners, apparently independent of the profession of painting, which ostensibly was his occupation, though it is believed that he, and several other gentlemen of leisure and observation from Britain, were travelling in this country for political purposes. From Mr. Alexander, young STUART first received lessons in the grammar of the art of painting, and after the summer spent in Rhode Island, he accompanied him to the South, and afterwards to Scotland. Mr Alexander died not long after his arrival in Edinburgh, leaving his |