Gilbert Stuart: the face man of the young republic

In 1796, the most famous painter in America deliberately left a portrait unfinished — and then made a fortune off it.

The sitter was George Washington. Martha Washington had talked her husband into one more sitting, hoping for a matched pair of portraits to hang at home. Gilbert Stuart painted the President's head and shoulders, brilliant and alive, against a blank brown background. Then he stopped. He never finished it, and he never handed it over. He had realized something: as long as the original stayed in his studio, he could copy it again and again and sell each copy. He is said to have called those copies his "hundred-dollar bills," after his price. By the time he died, he had reportedly made well over a hundred of them.

That is the kind of man Stuart was — gifted, charming, and chronically, almost cheerfully broke.

He was born in Rhode Island in 1755, the son of a Scottish snuff-maker. He sailed to London as a young man and talked his way into the studio of Benjamin West, the expatriate American painter who trained a whole generation. Stuart learned fast. In 1782 a single picture — The Skater, a gentleman gliding across a frozen pond — made him the talk of London almost overnight. Commissions poured in. So did debts. By 1787 he had fled to Dublin to escape his English creditors, where he promptly ran up Irish ones too.

In 1793 he came home to America with a plan as simple as it was audacious: paint George Washington, and let every other commission in the country follow. It worked. He settled into Philadelphia, then the seat of government, and the founders lined up. Stuart painted the first six Presidents. He painted more than a thousand people in all. He set the standard for what an American portrait looked like — and he did it while leaving his family so deep in debt that he was buried in an unmarked grave.

Stuart's gift was skin. Other painters made faces look painted; Stuart made them look warm.

He worked differently from his rivals. Where his contemporary John Singleton Copley finished a portrait one careful section at a time, Stuart attacked the whole canvas at once and made no preliminary drawings — he blocked the shapes straight in with a loaded brush. For the face he laid down opaque color first, then floated transparent and semi-transparent layers over it, so the underpainting glowed up through the surface. The trick gave his sitters that fresh, just-breathing look. Obverse and reverse, the heads and tails of a coin, were Robert Scot's department; living flesh was Stuart's.

He had a rule about color, and it was the opposite of cautious. He told his pupil Matthew Harris Jouett: "Never be sparing of colour, load your pictures, but keep your colours as separate as you can. No blending, tis destruction to clear & beautiful effect." Lay it on, he meant — but never muddy it.

So how does a portrait painter end up on a coin? In 1795 the new Mint Director, Henry William DeSaussure, wanted to lift the artistry of the nation's young silver coinage. He turned to the best portraitist in the country. Stuart produced a drawing of Liberty as a graceful young woman, her long hair tied back with a ribbon — what numismatists call a fillet. The face was modeled, by long tradition, on Ann Willing Bingham, a celebrated Philadelphia society beauty (this is the accepted story, drawn from interviews with Stuart's descendants decades later — likely true, but never documented in his own hand).

Stuart only drew it. Turning a drawing into coinage took two more hands: the sculptor John Eckstein, paid thirty dollars to render Stuart's sketches into plaster models, and the Mint's chief engraver, Robert Scot, who cut the working dies. The result was the Draped Bust design — and it ran on America's silver and copper for more than a decade.