In the summer of 1775, a nineteen-year-old Stuart sailed for London after his loyalist family fled to Nova Scotia. With virtually no plans, he first supported himself as a church organist. After about two years and, by his own account "pitching headlong into misery," he threw himself on the mercy of Benjamin West (1738–1820), the esteemed American artist who was history painter to King George III. West took Stuart in as a resident assistant and put him to work finishing draperies and backgrounds on what Stuart would later refer to as his master's "ten-acre pictures."

Over the next decade, Stuart was drawn into the dynamic London art scene, a mix of public commerce and private display, vying exhibition venues, and the nascent critical press that described every little episode. Even as he worked for and remained loyal to West, he studied portraits painted by George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy of Art, who favored Stuart and sent patrons his way. Stuart assimilated the fashionable English idiom, and his patronage grew quickly. He leased a fine house, married an English woman named Charlotte Coates, and began a family. In April 1787, the newspaper The World dubbed him "the Vandyke of the Time," high praise connecting a young artist from the colonies to England's revered seventeenth-century portraitist. Yet, he accepted more work than he could finish, and his fortunes fell as his reputation rose. By the summer of 1787, newspapers reported variously that Stuart had clients in France and that he had been called home to America by his father. In fact, the painter and his family had gone to Dublin.

The Boydell Pictures

Fairly soon after his success at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1782, Stuart accepted a major commission from the politician, print publisher, entrepreneur, and patron of the arts John Boydell (1719–1804), hailed as "the Medicis of his time and place." Stuart would paint a series of fifteen portraits of painters and engravers, each of whom was involved in Boydell's business in one way or another. In his print gallery, Boydell planned to display the paintings after which the prints had been made and Stuart's portraits of Boydell's artists. The cornerstone of Boydell's first installation was John Singleton Copley's grand historical tableau The Death of Major Peirson (Tate, Britain) in a magnificent frame designed by Robert Adam. The big painting with three portraits by Stuart went on display in the summer of 1784. The entire installation of paintings and prints came together in the fall of 1786. Stuart's portraits of his colleagues reveal his increasing talent for bust-length portraits and marked the beginning of what would become his forte–the interpretation of character in portraiture.


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