Word: portraitist
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...Hill through field glasses from his post in Roxbury, but he resigned his commission in a huff and later departed for London. Gilbert Stuart, then 19, got away in the spring of 1775 aboard the last ship to escape the embargo in Boston Harbor. John Singleton Copley, best portraitist in the colonies, was a Tory sympathizer who left Boston in 1774, never returned...
Down with the Mickey Finn. Ironically, the Armory show also marked the end of Henri's overwhelming influence (although he lived until 1929). As a portraitist, Henri strove to catch "the living instant," and he often said his goal was "to paint the greatest portrait in the world in 30 minutes." His robust bravura can still hold the spectator's eye. But today Henri's surface effects seem thin and superficial, less revolutionary than mannered Manet...
...picture's shadowy history was pieced together recently by Art Historian Katharine McCook Knox. A Chicago promoter commissioned the canvas from the most fashionable portraitist of the day, George Peter Alexander Healy, just after the 1860 elections. Healy buttonholed the President-elect at Springfield, got him to sit three times. A visiting politician dropped by the senate chamber in Springfield's old statehouse to watch one of the sittings, later described the scene: "He [Lincoln] sat to the artist with his right foot on top of the left and both feet turned inward-pigeon fashion-round-shouldered-looking...
...happy Lincoln ... It is a disarmingly personal impression of the eyes of true greatness at a moment when they were lighted with the surprise, the honor and the vision of supreme opportunity." Lesser matters than the presidency could light Lincoln's eyes and give him ideas. Portraitist Healy (who died in 1894) recalled that Lincoln burst out laughing in the midst of one sitting, over a letter from a critical little girl. Lincoln asked Healy to pass on it: "As a painter, Mr. Healy, you should be a judge between this unknown correspondent and me. She complains...
...contemporary paintings. To his dismay. Tailor's critic discovered that, clearly, the best-dressed man "hanging on the wall at Burlington House" was pinstriped Winthrop W. Aldrich, U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, whose likeness in Savile Row finery was painted by famed British Portraitist James Gunn (TIME, May 10). Said Tailor: "If we reflect that our British reputation for fine clothes owes a great deal to a natural talent for wearing them properly, this being outworn by a foreigner has a significance to sober the apathetic...