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Once he had made up his mind, he felt gay. He spent his last
night in Newport playing the flute under the window of a young lady and mocking the night-capped burghers
who shouted for quiet from the neighbouring windows. Then he went to Boston to wait for his boat. During his
short stay there, he seems to have given instruction to a young boy who was himself to have a brilliant
career in England as a painter. Mather Brown wrote to his aunts in 1817 that Stuart "was the first person
who learnt me to draw at about twelve years of age at Boston. He lived then near Mr. Whiting's, a print
seller near Mill Bridge." * In a year or so Brown
•John Hill Morgan argues that, since Brown became
twelve in October 1773, this letter demonstrates that Stuart must have stopped off in Boston on his
way
Gilbert Stuart. ^
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was to run away from his grandfather and wander with a knapsack
on his back through the countryside in a successful effort to make enough money as an itinerant painter of
miniatures to follow his instructor to London.
Stuart was in Boston during the battle of Lexington,
but "the shot heard round the world" did not inspire him to do any shooting. He sailed on June 16, 1775,
the day before the battle of Bunker Hill. What thoughts passed through his mind as he saw the beleaguered
city disappear behind him? He had set out for the British Isles before, in the company of a. distinguished
and powerful patron, but the result had been tragedy. Now he was alone, with only enough money in his pocket
to keep him a few days in the forbidding British capital. He had but one letter of introduction, to a Scot
named Alexander Grant whom he had never seen. Everything depended on the chance that Waterhouse, from whom
he had received no word, would be in London.
Naturally Stuart hurried to Waterhouse's lodgings the
instant he arrived, but he was told that his friend was in Edinburgh attending medical school. Stuart stood
dazed in the hallway for a moment and then without a word walked out into the street; his prospects had sunk to
nothing. He took a tiny, airless room in the house of a tailor, and ate as little as he could, but the few
shillings in his pocket decreased daily, while he saw no prospect of replenishing them, for he had no way of
finding possible patrons for portraits. Again he walked the pavements of a strange city with the gait that he
remembered, the aimless shuffling of the unpossessed who have
back from Scotland. Such an assumption, however,
cannot be made to accord with Waterhouse's account of Stuart's return, and Brown himself, as his letter
explicitly states, was not certain that he was exactly twelve when he studied with Stuart. He might have
been fourteen. .
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America's Old Masters
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