biographie de Jane STUART (c.1812-1888)

Birth place: Boston, MA

Death place: Newport, RI

Addresses: Newport, RI, 1828 and after

Profession: Portrait painter

Studied: with her father, Gilbert Stuart in Boston

Exhibited: NAD, 1829-45

Work: Redwood Lib.; Newport Art Mus.; Rhode Island Hist. Soc.; Colby College; Bowdoin College; New Britain Mus. of American Art; CGA; Harvard Univ.; De Young Mem. Mus.; Essex Inst., Salem; Wadsworth Atheaneum

Comments: She was the youngest child of Gilbert Stuart (see entry), from whom she received her early training by acting as his assistant and watching him instruct other artists. After her father's death in 1828, the family was penniless, and it was Jane who set up a studio in Boston and supported the family by painting copies of her father"s famous portraits of George Washington. She soon developed a following for her own portraits and miniatures. Stuart also painted and exhibited several genre pictures (NAD). Although she and her mother and three sisters moved to Newport, RI, she continued to maintain her Boston studio until the 1850s, when a fire destroyed much of her work and almost all the correspondence and mementos of her father's life. She was a colorful and well-liked figure in Newport, impoverished again in later years and living with her sister in a small house, quietly bought for them by wealthy friends.

Sources: G&W; Jane Stuart, "Anecdotes of Gilbert Stuart by His Daughter," Scribner's Monthly Magazine (July 1877): 377; Powel, Miss Jane Stuart, 1812-1888"; Morgan, Gilbert Stuart and His Pupils, 49-51; 8 Census (1860), Mass., XXVIII, 58; Cowdrey, AA & AAU; Cowdrey, NAD; Swan, BA; Rutledge, PA; Rutledge, MHS; Boston Transcript, April 30, 1888, obit. More recently, see Rubinstein, American Woman Artists, 43-45; add'l info. courtesy of Elinor Nacheman, Pawtucket, RI."

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