When Stuart reached Newport at last, he could not make him­self describe his trip home even to his best friend. "What his treat­ment was I never could learn," writes Waterhouse. "I only know that it required a few weeks to equip him with suitable clothing to appear on the streets, or to allow any one of his former friends, save the writer, to know of his return home. Suffice it to say that it was such as neither Gilbert Stuart, father or son, ever thought proper to mention."

After a while, Stuart returned to his painting, and he had little difficulty securing portrait commissions; had he not studied abroad? ■His work was very like Alexander's, even to the squarish shape given all faces. Both men painted smoothly and tightly, the em­phasis being on line rather than form. To this writer, at least, the paintings of Stuart's young manhood fail to give the hesitant and striving impression usually associated with the works of a badly trained genius who aches to paint better than his teachers. They show rather the smug self-sufficiency typical of an inferior crafts­man who is satisfied with his technique and will never develop further. It may be that Stuart really believed he painted first-class portraits, for the connoisseurs of Newport in their ignorance ad­mired his work inordinately. "Our aspiring artist," writes Water-house, "had as much business as he could turn, his hands to, and the buoyancy of his spirits kept pace with his good fortune." The horrible days in Scotland seemed forgotten while the gay young man dashed off portraits, flirted with -the ladies, taught himself to play various musical instruments, and tried his hand at composing. "Once," his friend continues, "he attempted to enrapture me by a newly studied classical composition. I exerted all the kind atten­tion I could muster up for the occasion, until his sharp eye de­tected by my physiognomy that I did not mUch relish it. He col­oured, sprang up in a rage, and striding back and forth the Moor, vociferated: 'You have no more taste for music than a jackassl And it is all owing to your stupid Quaker education!' "

Although Stuart seemed as outrageous and self-confident as ever, he showed no inclination to try experiments that would take him out of the narrow field of face painting in which he felt himself proficient. When the Redwood Library invited him to execute a full-length of its founder, he refused the commission that might have heightened his reputation, and answered all remonstrances with "sullen silence," although by doing so he turned the popular tide in some degree against him, and cooled the zeal of many of his friends. Probably Stuart, who had never painted a full-length, was not sure he could do a good one. His pride, which had suffered so severely during the past few years, was unwilling to risk a venture that might turn out badly, nor would it let him tell even his most intimate friend that he considered anything beyond his powers. Without a word, he watched his popularity diminish.

The times were not propitious anyway. Revolutionary agitation was mounting higher daily; before long it become clear there would be war. When his family, whose friends were all Tories, fled to Nova Scotia, Gilbert could not afford to go along, since there would be no demand for painting in that wild region. He stayed behind in Newport, but fewer and fewer commissions came to him as all minds turned to the impending struggle, in whose issues Stuart had little interest. Sadly he watched Waterhouse sail for England to complete his medical education there; the youth who had been stranded in Scotland now found himself well on the way to being stranded in his native city. Perhaps some rich relatives he had in Philadelphia took an interest in his plight, for Peale tells us that during the 1770*5 he was asked to accept as a pupil a young man who he later inferred must have been Stuart. However, nothing came of it. Stuart regarded himself as a professional, not a student, and in all probability did not find the. prospect of going to Mary­land or Philadelphia exciting. By nature inclined to desperate ex­pedients, he borrowed enough money to buy passage to>London, although he had no friends in that city except Waterhouse. He promised himself that Waterhouse, who was blessed with cash and English connexions, would take care of him. And perhaps he did not realize that he was too inferior a painter to earn his living in the British capital.