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- 18th Century American Painting
- Dr. Walter Landor , circa 1785
- oil on canvas
- 28 1/4 in. x 23 1/4 in. (71.76 cm x 59.06 cm)
- Gilbert Stuart (North Kingston, RI, December 3, 1755 - July 27, 1828, Boston, MA)
- American
- Museum Purchase: Currier Funds, 1934.3
- On View
Interpretive text from Exploring American Art: An Online Resource for the American Collections
Gilbert Stuart's development as a newly arrived portrait painter in England was nothing less than extraordinary. The work he produced in Newport, Rhode Island, in the early 1770s on his own and under the tutelage of Scottish painter Cosmo Alexander (1724-1772) was flat, linear, and somber in tonality-awkward, if sometimes charming. But shortly after arriving in London in 1775, he found a place in the studio of the benevolent expatriate Benjamin West (1738-1820), who nurtured Stuart's natural talent for painting faces and who introduced him to the artistic and social luminaries of late eighteenth-century London. Stuart quickly mastered the painterly, atmospheric manner of the fashionable British portraitists of his day. His sophisticated style and engaging manner won him important commissions, and after the triumph of The Skater (1782, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1782, he was able to compete successfully for portrait business in a market that included such masters as Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) and George Romney (1734-1802). In 1787, he left London for Dublin, where he spent five years, returning to the United States (one step ahead of his creditors, for he spent money even faster than he earned it) in 1792 to become the painter of presidents.
The painting Dr. Walter Landor was probably executed in the mid-1780s, at the height of Stuart's London career. Landor (1732-1805), an Oxford-trained physician, was in his fifties when he sat for Stuart. He was a prominent landowner in both Staffordshire and Warwickshire and had a large family: five children by his first wife, Mary Wright, who died in 1769, and seven more by his second wife, Elizabeth Savage, whom he married in 1774. The oldest son of the second marriage was the noted British poet and critic Walter Savage Landor.
As was typical of Stuart's portraiture, his image of Landor reveals little of the sitter's personal history. There is no allusion to his profession, his property, or his progeny: rather, the focus is almost entirely on his face. Landor is shown at half-length, against a freely painted pinkish sky. His expression is serious but not forbidding, characterized by firmly set lips but also by alert blue-gray eyes and a ruddy complexion. He wears a rich, deep blue jacket generously ornamented with gold buttons and braid, a butter-colored vest, and frothy jabot-a costume conceived both as a complement to the sitter's pleasing coloring and a demonstration of the painter's skill. Fabric and especially flesh are painted with thin translucent tones so that, despite the conventional pose and generalized setting, the image seems luminous and animated. Later in life, Stuart would describe his method to the young painter William Dunlap (1766-1839): "Good flesh coloring [partakes] of all colors, not mixed, so as to be combined in one tint, but shining through each other, like the blood through the natural skin." This portrait is an idealized likeness of a man of distinction; in Stuart's facile hands, Walter Landor also becomes a living, breathing presence.
CT
REFERENCE
William Dunlap. A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, 1918 ed., 3 vols. Boston: C.E. Goodspeed & Co., 1834. Vol. I, pp. 192-263.
