JANE STEWART (1812-1888, American) Portrait Of A Woman

Oil on canvas 30 x 25 in, 36 x 31 in (framed). Signed verso. From a Coconut Grove estate. The youngest daughter of famous portraitist Gilbert Stuart, she also became a noted portraitist from a studio in Boston and did numerous copies of her father's well-known paintings of George Washington. Other artists also copied these portraits, but hers are credited with being some of the best including the one in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.She showed art talent as a child but instead of being encouraging, her father tried to suppress her own creativity to keep her as his assistant to grind colors and fill in his backgrounds. When her father died penniless, she became the sole support of the family although she was the youngest of three girls.In addition to portraits, she also painted some quaint, narrative genre works. In 1850, her studio burned, which destroyed much of her painting as well as most of the correspondence and mementoes of her father's life.Her later years, she spent in Newport, Rhode Island where she was fondly called "Miss Jane" and became a colorful, popular personality with sardonic humor, laughing about her ugliness and her misfortune of looking like her father. She told fortunes and reminisced about him in articles for "Scribner's Monthly" magazine.She was also poverty stricken and when she and her sister had their house sold out from under them by debtors, friends took up a collection and bought them another small home in Newport where they lived their final years.Source: Charlotte Rubinstein, AMERICAN WOMEN ARTISTS
Condition Report: Small repair in left margin