Having some kind of subsistence assured him by the position of organist he thus secured, Stuart began that desultory dallying with art which later often left him without a dry crust for his daily bread. While his work was always serious, his temperament never was, and he seems to have played cruel jokes upon himself, as carelessly as he did upon others. For two years his career is almost lost to art; only once in a while did he gather himself together to work at his painting. He had, however, to a marked degree, that odd resource of genius which enabled him to work best and catch up with lost time when under the spur of necessity. In later days, with sitters besieging his door, he would turn them away, one by one, until the larder was empty and there was not a penny left in the purse; then he would go to work and in an incredibly short time produce one of his masterpieces. Such was the character, in outline, of the man who went to London to study under West, and, after reaching the metropolis, let two years slip by him without seeking his chosen master. Finally he went to the famous American and was received as a pupil and as a member of the painter’s family, in true apprentice style. Just what Stuart learned from West it is difficult to imagine;--unless it was how not to paint. For, without desiring or meaning to join in the hue and cry of to-day against the art of West, but on the contrary, protesting against the clamor which fails to consider the conditions that existed in his time and therefore fails to do him the justice that is his due, there is surely nothing in the work of the one to suggest anything in the work of the other. For five long and doubtless weary years Stuart plodded under the guidance of his gentle master until, tired of doing some of the most important parts of West’s royal commissions, for which his remuneration was probably only his keep and tuition, without even the chance of glory, he broke away and opened a studio for himself in New Burlington Street. If Stuart did gain little in art from West, he gained much of the invaluable benefit of familiar intercourse with persons of the first distinction, who were frequenters of the studio of the King’s painter. This was of great advantage to the young artist when he set up his own easel, and many of these men became his early sitters.