Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), American painter, was the classical portraitist of the early republic, painting likenesses that hovered between meticulous representations and idealized generalizations. He created the iconic image of George Washington as the Father of His Country.

Gilbert Stuart was born in North Kingston, R.I., on Dec. 3, 1755. At the age of 13 or 14 he studied art with the Scottish painter Cosmo Alexander in Newport. With Alexander he made a tour of the South and a journey to Edinburgh, where Alexander died in 1772. For about a year Stuart remained, poverty-stricken, in Scotland, but finally, working as a sailor, he managed to get back to America. There he executed a few portraits in a hard limner fashion. With the Revolutionary War threatening, his family, who had Tory sympathies, fled to Nova Scotia, and Stuart sailed for London, where he remained from 1775 to 1787.

For the first 4 or 5 years, Stuart served as...