The Edgar P. Richardson Symposium: Gilbert Stuart
April 16, 2005
East Building Auditorium
Held in conjunction with the exhibition
Gilbert Stuart
The Politics of Portraiture
Stuart and the London Art World of the 1780s
Alex Kidson, curator of British art, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
This lecture will examine Stuart's place as a young man in the ranks of society portraitists in London. His standing, compared with such rivals as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and George Romney; the patterns of his patronage; the institutional framework of artistic production; and the shifting politics of colonial relations all informed the development of his art and his expectations and assumptions when he returned to America in 1793.
Who Are All These People? Society and Leadership in Gilbert Stuart's World
Joanne B. Freeman, professor of history, Yale University
Gilbert Stuart's portraits offer an insider's view of the world of the social and political elite in the early American republic. Like Stuart himself, these men and women were struggling to determine the tone and character of a new nation, borrowing some things from the Old World and adding some things that were new. Everyone agreed that the new nation would be a republic; they likewise agreed that as good republicans, Americans would be everything that their European forebears were not--egalitarian, democratic, representative, and straightforward. Yet the looming presence of the European example complicated matters. Whether defining themselves against it or striving to match it, Americans had European precedents before their eyes.
As social and political leaders of the new republic, Stuart’s sitters faced such ambiguities on a daily basis. What sort of people should lead a republic? Should they model themselves after their European equivalents or try something new? How should a republican leader behave and dress? This lecture will explore the realities of living in such a politicized world, formed by an intricate web of familial, personal, and political connections. Using Stuart’s sitters--and portraits--as a starting point, it will offer a window into Gilbert Stuart’s world.
Original Copies: Gilbert Stuart's Companion Portraits of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison
Linda J. Docherty, associate professor of art history, Bowdoin College
Late in 1804, James Bowdoin III received a long-sought political appointment as American minister to the court of Spain. Before sailing for Europe, the aspiring diplomat wrote to Henry Dearborn in Washington asking him to procure two half-length portraits of President Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison, to be executed from life by Gilbert Stuart and shipped to Bowdoin in Spain. Stuart responded with some alacrity to this singular commission; four months later, Dearborn reported to the minister's nephew-in-law that the paintings were almost finished. Bowdoin's diplomatic mission proved a failure, however, and the pictures presumably intended for the official residence in Madrid were transferred in 1807 to his Boston home. Absorbed into his art collection, they assumed a place among copies of old masters and images of historical worthies. In this lecture, Docherty resituates the Bowdoin companion paintings of Jefferson and Madison in a context of European sources and historical circumstances surrounding their creation. In so doing, she illuminates Stuart's conceptual originality as a painter of state portraits.
The Bowdoin commission was unusual insofar as it called for companion paintings of two men. In response, Stuart took as his model an unfinished double portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds of British Prime Minister Lord Rockingham and his secretary Edmund Burke, seen by the artist during his years in London. Beyond improving upon Reynolds' double portrait, Stuart imitated the grand manner tradition more generally in the Bowdoin paintings. While they retain the conventional classical column and red curtain, these state portraits are remarkable for their austerity of dress and setting. Such willful rejection of European pomp accords with Jefferson and Madison's public self-presentations as plain and modest citizens. Artistically, it sets Stuart's images of the president and his secretary in opposition to European prototypes. Such a bold assertion of American difference would have been appropriate given the historical circumstances under which the works were made. Through a circle of Washington sitters that included the Spanish minister, Stuart would have known of America's escalating disputes with Spain over trade and territory. In contrast to the elaborate Lansdowne portrait of George Washington, which alludes to a burgeoning alliance between Great Britain and her former colonies, the sober Bowdoin commission was designed to complement a diplomatic assignment in which American and European interests were at odds.
A Lecture on Heads, or Stuart and Physiognomy
Wendy Bellion, assistant professor, department of art history, University of Delaware
Gilbert Stuart's greatest years of success as a portraitist coincided with the widespread popularity of a visual practice called physiognomy. Developed by the Swiss minister Johann Caspar Lavater, physiognomy was a pseudoscience of character interpretation. Lavater believed that an individual's unique "essence," or interior qualities, could be discerned in his or her external facial features and skull. One couldn't detect this essence by studying faces directly, however, because individuals could easily contort their muscles or change expression to misrepresent themselves. Instead, Lavater advised, physiognomists should look for signs of internal traits in a person's shadow or silhouette. "Shades," as he called this linear mode of portraiture, offered the most "immediate expression of nature, such as not the ablest painter is capable of drawing by hand."
Lavater's theories enjoyed a warm reception in the early national United States. Artists and spectators--including Stuart's contemporary Charles Willson Peale--embraced physiognomy as a method of ascertaining the truth about friends and strangers alike within a culture seemingly awash with imposters, counterfeiters, and demagogues. Did Stuart's patrons and audience bring a knowledge of physiognomy to bear upon their experience of his portraits? Did Lavater's ideas exercise influence on Stuart's artistic processes? This lecture explores such questions by examining Stuart's work in connection with discourses and practices of physiognomy in early America--in particular, the astounding popularity of the "physiognotrace," a silhouette machine that was enjoyed by thousands of middle-class spectators in cities and towns across the country.
Gilbert Stuart's Wit
Susan Rather, associate professor of art history, department of art and art history, University of Texas
The role that fine art should play in the new American republic was deeply contested. Leading painters argued that pictures could serve the public good by promoting virtue, and they argued for their own status as gentleman practitioners of a liberal art, distinct from mechanics in trade. Gilbert Stuart subscribed to and advanced such views, making himself the indispensable portraitist of George Washington, among other notables. At the same time, he maintained a pronounced sense of humor about the self-important situation of the American artist.
Writers from Stuart's time to ours have delighted in the artist's irony and irreverence--most famously, his cynical calculation that each authorized copy of the iconic Athenaeum portrait of George Washington was worth a "hundred-dollar bill" to him. Yet such stories have rarely provided more than comic relief to Stuart's catalogue of sober republican faces and have tended to reinforce his image as a facile stylist who cranked out portraits to support prodigal habits. Stuart's colorful personality, it sometimes seems, overshadowed his accomplishments as a painter.
Renewed attention to Stuart's art--notably in the present exhibition--offers a corrective to persistent emphasis on his wit. But important historical questions remain: What purpose did Stuart's humor serve for the artist himself, his contemporaries, and for later writers? Did Stuart construct his remarks in opposition to prevailing views? Did he grant himself a visual outlet for the wit and humor he so often deployed verbally on matters of art and artists? Exploration of these issues offers a complicating perspective on the conditions, substance, and character of American art during the early republic.
My Pencil is Bolder than Yours: Gilbert Stuart, the Poets, and the Question of Representational Power
David S. Shields, editor, Early American Literature and McClintock Professor of Southern Letters, University of South Carolina
The period from 1790 to 1810 marked a divergence in the aesthetic tendencies of portrait painting and poetry. For much of the eighteenth century, poets had argued that their greater capacity to capture the interior of persons made their art more true than portrait painting, which supplied a likeness of the human exterior (H. Brooke's "On Penn Painted in Armor"). At the end ofthe century, the terms of the contest changed. Stuart's portraiture manifested the new interest in categorical analysis of characterological types found in physiognomy.
This enlightenment complication of the abstractive understanding of human beings in terms of character rendered sitters in terms of a visual code of physical attributes. These physical attributes in turn figured such interior conditions as virtue, spiritual disposition, and mental capacity. Poetry in the 1790s began to turn away from character to envision human beings as personalities. By examining the poetry of several figures who had contact with Stuart in America, particularly his Philadelphia host, William Moore Smith, we will see what the turn toward personality entailed and ask whether painting would be able to follow this turn after it became a dominant literary mode, when it became the ideological centerpiece of Joseph Dennie's circle of writers publishing in the Port Folio.
Panel DiscussionA panel discussion will follow the lectures. The speakers will be joined by Carrie Rebora Barratt, curator of American paintings and sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Ellen G. Miles, curator of painting and sculpture, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; William Pressly, professor of art history, University of Maryland; and Damie Stillman, John W. Shirley Professor Emeritus of Art History, University of Delaware.
About the Edgar P. Richardson Symposium
Named in honor of Edgar P. Richardson (1902–1985), this symposium pays tribute to Mr. Richardson's significant contributions to the field of American art. During his career, he distinguished himself as a scholar; as a director of both the Detroit Institute of Art and the H. F. du Pont Winterthur Museum; as a cofounder of the Archives of American Art; as a president and board member of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and as a commissioner of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery from 1966 until 1979.
Mr. Richardson invigorated the study of American art through exhibitions and such publications as his Painting in America: The Story of Four Hundred Fifty Years (1956), and also by giving other scholars the tools to follow in his footsteps. Above all, he sought to inspire, arguing, "The serious, critical study of American art is required...to enable us to understand ourselves as a people."
The Edgar P. Richardson Symposium was established at the National Portrait Gallery with the generous support of Mr. Richardson's longtime friend and fellow former National Portrait Gallery commissioner, Mr. Robert L. McNeil Jr.
The symposium is jointly organized by the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery of Art.