Browere's Life Masks of Great AmericansHart, Charles Henry
History
Browere's Life Masks of Great Americans
Hart, Charles Henry
Browere, John Henri Isaac, 1792-1834; Masks (Sculpture); Sculpture, American; United States -- Biography -- Portraits
Stuart’s daughter, Jane, who died at Newport, in 1888, at a very
advanced age, and was as “impossible” in some respects as was her
distinguished father, remembered well the incident of the mask being
taken, and testified to its marvellous life-speaking qualities. Having
lost all knowledge of its whereabouts, she searched for years in the
hope of finding it, since she looked upon it as the next thing to having
her father before her. Finally, in the Centennial year, it was
discovered
[Illustration: GILBERT STUART
Age 70]
in the possession of Browere’s son, and was purchased by Mr. David King,
of Newport, as a present for Miss Stuart. But Miss Stuart felt that her
little cottage, so well remembered by many visitors to Newport, was no
place for so big a work, and desired that it might be placed in a public
gallery, which wish Mr. King complied with, by presenting it to the
Redwood Library, at Newport, where it may be seen by all interested in
Stuart or in Browere’s life masks. Jane Stuart is the subject of Colonel
Wentworth Higginson’s charming paper, “One of Thackeray’s Women,” in his
volume of Essays entitled “Concerning All of Us.”
Gilbert Stuart was born in what was called the Narragansett country, on
December 3, 1755. The actual place of his birth is now called Hammond
Mills, near North Kingston, Rhode Island, about nine miles from
Narragansett Pier; and the old-fashioned gambrel-roofed, low-portalled
house, in which the future artist first saw light, still stands at the
head of Petaquamscott Pond. The snuff-mill set up by Gilbert Stewart,
the father of the painter, who had come over from Perth, in Scotland, at
the suggestion of a fellow Scotchman, Doctor Thomas Moffatt, to
introduce the manufacture of snuff into the colonies, was located, by
the race, immediately under the room in which Stuart was born, both
being part of the same building, so that Stuart’s excuse for taking
snuff, that he was born in a snuff-mill, is literally true.
When four months old, the third and youngest child of the snuff-grinder
and his beautiful wife, Elizabeth Anthony, was carried, on Palm Sunday,
to the Episcopal church and baptized “Gilbert Stewart.” The significance
of this record is found in the orthography of the surname and in the
limitation of the baptismal name. Stuart’s name will be found in print
quite frequently as “Gilbert Charles Stuart,” and I have seen it as
“Charles Gilbert Stuart”; and the Jacobin leaning of his Scotch sire, is
commonly supported by the naming of the child for the last of the Royal
Stuarts, the romantic Prince Charlie. This pretty legend, built to
support unreliable tradition, is blown to the winds by the prosaic
church record, which shows that the artist’s orthography was an
assumption, and his name simply Gilbert Stewart. That this plebeian
spelling of the royal name, was not an error or accident of the scribe
who made it, is proved by signatures of the snuff-grinder which have
come down to us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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