Gilbert Stuart: the face man of the young republic

In 1796 the most sought-after painter in America deliberately left a portrait unfinished — and made a small fortune off the decision.

The sitter was George Washington. Stuart painted the President's head and shoulders, brilliant and alive, against a bare brown ground — and then stopped. He never finished it and never handed it over. He had realized something: as long as the original stayed in his studio, he could copy it again and again and sell each copy. He reportedly priced the replicas at a hundred dollars apiece and called them his "hundred-dollar bills." He painted dozens of them — accounts say somewhere around fifty to a hundred, and the higher figures are probably inflated by retelling.

That is the kind of man Stuart was: gifted, charming, and chronically, almost cheerfully broke.

He was born in Rhode Island in 1755, the son of a Scottish immigrant in the snuff-making trade. He sailed to London as a young man and, in 1777, became a protégé of Benjamin West — the expatriate American painter who trained a whole generation. Stuart learned fast. In 1782 a single full-length portrait, The Skater, a gentleman gliding across a frozen pond, lifted him to fame almost overnight. Commissions poured in. So did debts. By 1787 he had fled to Dublin to dodge his English creditors, where, in his biographer's phrase, he "painted and accumulated debt with equal vigor."

In 1793 he came home to America with a plan as simple as it was shrewd: paint George Washington, and let every other commission in the country follow. It worked. He settled in Philadelphia, then the seat of government, and the founders lined up. Stuart painted the first six Presidents and roughly a thousand people in all. He set the standard for what an American portrait looked like — and still left his family so deep in debt that he was buried in an unmarked grave, bought cheaply.

Stuart's gift was skin. Other painters made faces look painted; Stuart made them look warm.

He worked differently from his rivals. Where his contemporary John Singleton Copley finished a portrait one careful section at a time, Stuart attacked the whole canvas at once. He made no preliminary drawings — he blocked the shapes straight in with a loaded brush. For the face he laid down opaque color first, then floated thin, semi-transparent layers over it, so the underpainting glowed up through the surface. That trick gave his sitters their fresh, just-breathing look.

He had a rule about color, and it was the opposite of cautious. He told his pupil Matthew Harris Jouett: "Never be sparing of colour, load your pictures, but keep your colours as separate as you can." Pile it on, he meant — but never muddy it.

So how does a portrait painter end up credited with a coin? In 1795 the new Mint Director, Henry William DeSaussure, wanted to raise the artistry of the nation's young silver. The story goes that he turned to the best portraitist in the country. Stuart produced a drawing of Liberty as a graceful young woman, her long hair tied back with a ribbon — what numismatists call a fillet, the band worn around the head. By tradition the face was modeled on Ann Willing Bingham, a celebrated Philadelphia society beauty.

Even at its most generous, that account makes Stuart the artist, not the coiner. A drawing is not a coin. Turning the sketch into struck silver took two more pairs of hands: the sculptor John Eckstein, paid thirty dollars in September 1795 to render the approved designs into plaster models, and the Mint's chief engraver, Robert Scot, who cut the working dies — the hardened steel stamps that press the image into a blank. The obverse (the heads side) and reverse (the tails side) as they actually struck were Scot's metal, whoever's pencil came first.

The result was the Draped Bust design, and it ran on American silver and copper for more than a decade.

Here is the honest answer collectors deserve: nobody can prove it.

Stuart's name appears on no Mint document. The attribution traces to the 1850s, when Mint Director James Ross Snowden was researching the institution's early history and interviewed Stuart's descendants — who told him their ancestor had designed the coin. That family recollection, gathered some sixty years after the fact, is the entire documentary basis. The vivid detail that Liberty was modeled on Ann Willing Bingham came later still, attached to the story by the twentieth-century numismatic author Don Taxay.

Modern research pushes back hard. One scholar, John Salyards, assembled a long, archive-based case — running to dozens of pages — arguing that Robert Scot and John Eckstein developed the Draped Bust between them, and that the Stuart story is a romantic graft onto Scot's record. Even Wikipedia's own entry concedes the plain version: "the designer of the coin is unknown."

We're left with two true sentences that sit awkwardly together. Stuart is widely credited with the Draped Bust Liberty, in coin references and museum labels alike. And that credit rests on thin, late, second-hand evidence that serious researchers dispute. The cleanest thing to say is the thing this page says: a beautiful drawing became a beautiful coin, the design is attributed to Stuart by long tradition, and the men with steel in their hands were Eckstein and Scot.