Gilbert Stuart

Others of less importance have made some special corner of the country theirs and possess a sort of squatter right over it.

To Bret Hart belongs mid-century California, to Mary Noales Murphree the Tennessee Mountains, to James Lane Allen and John Fox present-day Kentucky, to Mary Johnston colonial Virginia, to Ellen Glasgow present-day Virginia, to Stuart Edward White the Great Northwest.

Others cultivate a field peculiar to themselves.

Frank R. Stockton is whimsically humorous, Edith Wharton cynically deceptive, Mary Wilkins Freeman is most at home with rural New England character, and Thomas Nelson Page has done his best work in the South of Reconstruction days.

We shall have occasion in the next chapter to speak of it and of its maker.

Another of West's services to art was the wholehearted way in which he extended a helping hand to any who needed it.

He was always willing to give such instruction as he could, and among his pupils were at least four men who added not a little to American art, Charles Wilson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, and Thomas Sully.

Peale was born in Maryland in 1741 and was among other things a saddler, a coachmaker, a clockmaker, and a silversmith.

We all know this famous image.

It was made from a painting by Gilbert Stuart.

It's probably the most famous image of Washington.

It's one of the most iconic American images of all time, along with the American Gothic painting and the arch from the McDonald's logo.

Yeah, and oddly it's been the same Jefferson portrait the entire time.

Way back in 1869 they adapted a painting of Jefferson by artist Gilbert Stuart to be the art on the $2 bill, and it really has not changed.

So it, that's, it's been Jefferson the same way since 1869, which is, uh, shocking to me.

Yeah.

[laughs]

The newly renamed Youngstown Museum of Glow-in-the-Dark Art has resorted to adding black velvet flocking to its most prized pieces: a Rembrandt, two Pollocks, and a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, which, to be fair, looks pretty trippy now.

[laughs]

And all museum-goers need to wear a blacklight vest in order to avoid running into each other.

When the British marched on Washington in August of 1814, it was Dolly who saved George Washington's portrait.

The painting, a full-length Gilbert Stuart original, was screwed to the dining room wall.

Dolly ordered the frame broken, the canvas cut from its stretcher if necessary, refusing to leave until it was secured.

She left with the portrait, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and silver from the state service, hours before British soldiers arrived to burn the executive mansion, the Capitol, and most of the public buildings in a city that had barely existed for a decade.