In his later years, Stuart was very lonely; sometimes it seemed that his bottle was his only friend. Indeed, he was out of place in Boston, the self-styled "Christian Sparta" that was preparing for a moral renaissance. The ageing libertine loved to remember the gay evenings he had spent in Philadelphia, where every good fellow had emptied four or five bottles as a matter of course. He irritated the self-consciously cultured Bostonians by referring to Philadel­phia as "the Athens of America."

Stuart was not religious enough to please New England. Al­though his daughter Jane insisted that he did not work on the Sab­bath except when pressed, she admitted that he went to church only once in his twenty-three Massachusetts years. He remained standing 'during the sermon, leaning nonchalantly against the side of the pew and inhaling huge pinches of snuff. "Well," he said on his way home, "I do not think I shall go to church again. . . . I do not like the idea of a man getting up in a box and having all the con­versation to himself."

^ipAlthough he could still summon his courtly manners when he 'Wanted-them, Stuart no longer had the patience to dress neatly.

After his return from Roxbury to Boston in 1818, John Quincy Adams described him as follows: "His own figure is highly pic­turesque, with his dress always disordered, and taking snuff from a large round tin wafer box, holding perhaps half a pound, which he must use up in one day. He considers himself beyond question the first portrait painter of his age, and tells numbers of anecdotes concerning himself to prove it, with the utmost simplicity and un­consciousness of ridicule. His conclusion is not very wide of the truth."

However, Stuart seems never to have become really self-confident. If one of his fellow-artists dared point out the slightest fault in his work, he flew into a fury. We may be certain that he was still wor­ried by his inability to paint anything but heads and shoulders, for in his sixty-sixth year he made one last attempt to branch out; he painted his only landscape and attempted an ambitious composi­tion of a boy chasing butterflies. The pictures were not successful, and he never deviated from heads again.

Yet, despite his realization of his own inadequacies, Stuart lacked the sense of inferiority to European painters that haunted most of his compatriots. When the Academy of Florence asked him to paint them a head of himself-—"the greatest compliment," his daughter Anne thought, "ever paid to an American artist"—he did not even, answer the letter. He advised his pupils not to study in England, insisting art there "was at a standstill"; they would do better to stay at home. Indeed, American taste was better than that of the sophis­ticated Londoners, who compared all works of art to the old mas­ters, while Americans compared them to nature. The embittered old man was not, however, sanguine about the future of painting anywhere. "It was his opinion," Henry Sargent writes, "that the art was on the decline.! never argued with him, for he was a vain, proud man, and withal quick-tempered."

Stuart's painting hardly deteriorated during his old age, al­though, Neagle tells us, "his hand shook at times so violently that