Gilbert Stuart was born on December 3, 1755. He was born in Saunderstown, Rhode Island where his father, a Scottish immigrant, worked on the first waterpower snuff mill in the colonies. Stuart’s mother was from a large land-owning family in Middletown Rhode Island. Stuart lived in Saunderstown until he was seven. When his father’s business failed his family had to sell their interests at the snuff mill. They moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where they lived in a house Stuart later described as " a hovel on a Bannister’s Wharf."

It is in Newport where Stuart began to exhibit his skill as an artist. In 1771, Stuart began studying art with a Scottish portrait painter named Cosmo Alexander. In 1772, Stuart accompanied Alexander to Scotland. In Scotland Stuart studied at the University of Glasgow. Stuart soon returned to Newport due to the death of the older Cosmo Alexander.

The second portrait was a Lansdowne, painted in 1796. Stuart painted this Portrait in Germantown, Pennsylvania. When Stuart painted this portrait of presidential calm, he falsified the moment but caught the mood of the age. Washington, who had been the nation’s unanimous choice for commander of the army, for President of the Constitutional convention, and twice for President of the United States, was at the moment harassed, in his last full year in office, by the opposing claims of Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians. There was also controversy surrounding John Jays Treaty with Great Britain. Stuart, however, was able to portray the Washington who endured to become the symbol of national permanence above the squabble of politics.

1775, when Stuart was nineteen, he sailed alone to London. After he had been in London for two years he wrote to the artist Benjamin West, begging him for help because he could not support himself. West, and American, who had been living in London since 1763, took him on as a pupil and assistant. From 1777 to 1782, Stuart worked as an assistant for West. Stuart soon had his own studio in which he was no able to work as a portrait painter.

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