At a time when portraits celebrated national achievements and public heroes, as well as the self-aware experiences of private individuals, Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828) set high standards in portrait painting for his sitters, his colleagues, and his students. 
A masterful storyteller, Stuart engaged his sitters in lively conversation in order to capture unguarded expressions and gestures. During his long career, he worked in eight cities at home and abroad: Newport, Edinburgh, London, Dublin, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Boston. In each venue, the conditions for being a portrait painter differed, and Stuart faced varying expectations and demands because of his own growing reputation, his ambitions, competing artists, and his well-being.
Gilbert Stuart's legacy is full of contradictory evidence. He was extremely prolific but quite often failed to finish works, especially if the sitters annoyed or bored him. He commanded high prices for his work but constantly teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. He was charming and cantankerous, tolerant and opinionated, curious and dogmatic, easily offended but resilient, articulate, and verbose. Those who knew him characterized him in conflicting terms. One acquaintance called him "the most frightful looking man I ever saw," while another described him as "a man of noble type, robust and hearty, with a large frame and the bearing of a man who might stand before kings." Stuart is ranked among the most important American portrait painters, but his father was a Scot and he lived under British rule for more than half his life, including his youth in colonial Newport and almost twenty years in the British Isles.
Back in America, Stuart used skills honed in Britain, rather than inventing some distinctively indigenous idiom. He satisfied the need for lasting images of early national leaders created in an international language of portraiture. In the twelve years he spent in New York and the American capital cities of Philadelphia and Washington, he attracted a steady stream of sitters, including George Washington (1732–1799), John (1735–1826) and Abigail Adams (1744–1818), and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). His last two decades were spent in Boston, where his work never decreased in expression or skill. After his death, one eulogist put it this way: "He left us the features of those who have achieved immortality for themselves, and made known others who would but for his art have slept in their merited obscurity."
In Newport, Stuart was trained by an itinerant Scottish painter, and he had both talent and family connections that attracted him to the local elite. In London, he became an integral part of the highly codified system of British portraiture as upheld by the Royal Academy of Arts. He next worked in the relatively small city of Dublin, where his new patrons commissioned portraits on the grand scale that they expected from someone trained in London. The Irish may have been surprised to learn of Stuart's American roots when he spoke of returning "to my native soil" to paint the president of the new United States.
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