Portraits

<p><span class="deck"> Itinerant primitive painters dressed up the farmers and the burghers as they hoped posterity would remember them</span> </p>

<p>Painter to the Federalist aristocracy, Stuart created likenesses of leading citizens with great brilliance and exactitude.</p>

<p>When Winifred Smith Rieber confidently agreed to paint a group portrait of America’s five pre-eminent philosophers, she had no idea it would be all but impossible even to get them to stay in the same room with one another. </p>

<p><span class="deck">Declaring himself a “thorough democrat” George Caleb Bingham portrayed the American voter with an artist’s eye—and a seasoned politicians savvy</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> …so Lincoln joked. Actually he was eager to pose for portraits.</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Peter Marié, a bon vivant of the Gilded Age, asked hundreds of Society’s prettiest women to allow themselves to be painted for him alone</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck">It took half a century for his critics to see his subjects as clearly as he did; but, today, he stands as America’s preeminent portraitist.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> A picture taken the day before President Roosevelt’s death has been hidden away in an artist’s file until now</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck">A curious discovery on the Florida seashore, when a water cannon destroyed a suspicious package later found to contain </span><span class="body"><span class="body">miniature portraits by the celebrated American painter Gilbert Stuart</span></span></p>