Stuart’s parents early removed to Newport, where the son had the advantage of tuition in English and Latin, from the assistant minister of venerable Trinity parish; but in his boyhood Stuart seems to have shown none of those dominant characteristics which later were so strongly developed both in the artist and in the man, unless it may be the predilection for pranks and practical jokes that early manifested itself. The earliest picture that can be recognized as from the brush of Gilbert Stuart, is a pair of Spanish dogs belonging to the famous Dr. William Hunter, of Newport, which Stuart is said to have painted when in his fourteenth year; and what are claimed to be his first portraits, those of Mr. and Mrs. Bannister, have been so nearly destroyed by “restoration,” that nothing of the original work remains to show any merit the pictures may have possessed. Stuart’s first instruction in art was received from Cosmo Alexander, a Scotchman, who passed a few years in the colonies painting a number of interesting portraits in the affected, perfunctory manner of the period. Of Alexander nothing was known until recent investigations by the writer discovered him to be a great-grandson of George Jamesone, whom Walpole calls “the Vandyke of Scotland.” Alexander took Stuart, then in his eighteenth year, back with him to Scotland, to acquire a greater knowledge of art than was possible in the colonies at that time; and Stuart is claimed to have been at this period a student at the University of Glasgow. But this tradition, like that previously mentioned, is shattered, as tradition almost always is shattered, by the cold, unimaginative record, which fails to show his name on the matriculation register. Alexander died not long after reaching Edinburgh, and Stuart was left, according to his biographers, in the care of Alexander’s friend, “Sir George Chambers,” who “quickly followed Alexander to the grave,” leaving Stuart without protection. But this story is manifestly without foundation, as there _was_ no “Sir George Chambers” at the period considered. There was, however, a Scotch painter of some repute, Sir George Chalmers, of Cults, who had married either a sister or a daughter of Cosmo Alexander; and this Sir George Chalmers is doubtless the person intended, although he lived on until 1791, so that it could not have been his demise that threw Stuart upon his own resources, which, being few, necessitated his working his way home, on a collier, after a few months’ absence.