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During his seventy-first year, Stuart was induced by
a large honorarium to paint John Adams again. He must have been in a rare good humour, for he charmed the
ninety-year-old ex-President into softening his prejudice against painters. "Speaking generally," Adams
said, "no penance is like having one's picture done. You must sit in a constrained and unnatural position,
which is a trial to the temper. But I should like to sit for Stuart from the first of January to the last
of December, for he lets me do just what I please, and keeps me constantly amused by his conversation:" When
Stuart showed the finished portrait to one of his friends, he said: "Look at him. It is very like him, is it
not? Do you know what he is going to do? He is just going to sneeze."
Later that same year, Stuart suffered a stroke that paralysed
his left arm and the left side of his face; this depressed him greatly. Worried because he had made no
provision for his wife and daughters, he continued to paint, slowly and painfully, yet with amazing effect.
Gout joined with paralysis to make his life an unceasing round of pain. When in 1828 he became too sick to
rise, the doctors said his gout had settled on his chest and stomach. For three months he suffered mounting
agony. Calling one day, Washington Allston was horrified to see how emaciated was the body that lay rigid on
the bed. Solicitously he asked Stuart how he was. A ghost of the old scornful smile appeared on the
unparalysed side of Stuart's face. "Ah," he cried, "you can judge." He drew his pantaloons up to show his
shrunken legs. "You can see how much I am out of drawing." A few weeks later he was dead.
The facts of Stuart's burial are so strange that
they are almost inexplicable. Although he was the most famous painter in America;
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although Philadelphia's leading artists agreed to wear
mourning for a month in his honour; although the newspapers gave much space to his praises and to expressions
of national loss, his family hurried him without ceremony to his grave. They bought,the right to place him in a
vault owned by some tradesmen, and enclosed his body in the cheapest kind of coffin; the undertaker's bill was
only thirty-six dollars, while they spent seventy-five on mourning apparel.
Of course, the meanness of his funeral may have been in
accord with the dying man's wish, but how can we explain the fact that his wife and daughters,, once they had
left Stuart's body in someone else's family tomb, forgot where it was? His daughter Jane explains that a friend
wrote down the number of the vault during the interment, but lost the piece of paper; she regretted years
later that her father's bones were irrevocably mislaid and could not be moved to the plot his family had
acquired in a Newport graveyard. Jane's story obviously does not hold water. When they found that the vault
number had been lost, his family must have had several ways of securing it again. Even had their memories
failed them, they could have consulted the tradesmen from whom they had bought the right to bury Stuart, or the
records.of the graveyard, where a modern scholar, John Hill Morgan, found the information they declared was
unobtainable. We are led to wonder whether Stuart's family, who had been tortured for,so long by his
improvidence and ill-temper, were not indifferent to the fate of his body now mercifully
dead.
Thus sadly one of the greatest painters America has
ever pro-t duced passed from the national scene, and with him passed the great days of the first
American school of art. True, his pupils and West's pupils lived after him; Trumbull, Allston, Morse,
Vanderlyn, Sully, Neagle, Jouett, Harding—these and many others continued to paint with skill in the manner
of their teachers, and for another generation they dominated American painting. But none of them ever
equalled the fame of West, the versatility of Peale, or the excellence of Stuart and Copley. America's old
masters were dead.
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