Stuart moved to Boston in the summer of 1805 at the invitation of Massachusetts Senator Jonathan Mason, who effectively offered Stuart an introduction to the entire town. Stuart also had his own family members and acquaintances there. Former president John Adams and his wife, Abigail, now lived in Boston; Stuart still owed them the portraits he had begun in Philadelphia five years earlier. His mother lived in Boston with his sister, who was raising a family and running a boarding school for girls. And Stuart's oldest friend, Benjamin Waterhouse, was now a distinguished surgeon at Harvard College. It could be said that Stuart was coming home.

Stuart's extraordinary powers of conversation and his undiminished painting talent amazed his clients. In old age, he adopted a shorthand version of the painterly methods of his best English portraits: fluid, swift strokes that captured a deeper expression than mere likeness. He worked quickly, his brush gliding over the surface of his canvases or his favorite prepared wood panels. Numerous artists visited him in Boston, including Thomas Sully and Rembrandt Peale. Stuart never claimed any of them as his student, not even his daughter Jane, although nearly every American artist of the next generation ascribed credit to him or his works in the development of their own.

After the artist's death, Mayor Josiah Quincy raised money to purchase Stuart's unfinished portraits of George and Martha Washington for the Boston Athenaeum. The sale helped Stuart's family, left destitute at his demise. Other friends organized a memorial exhibition with loans of more than two hundred works. In his obituary of Stuart for the Boston Daily Advertiser, the painter Washington Allston eloquently captured his friend: "Gilbert Stuart was in its widest sense, a philosopher in his Art . . . as his works bear witness—whether as to the harmony of colours, or of lines or of light and shadow—showing that exquisite sense of a whole, which only a man of genius can realize and embody."


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