At the MIA in 1933. Someday, girls, someday.
Be still my heart. Isn’t he just a dreamboat? The S.S. Studly Do-Right! Why, he could just come over with that dog of his for colas anytime!
Well, who knows what the girls were really smiling about. This was 1933, after all, and the boy has longer hair than they do, kind of a British Fabio thing going on. So perhaps they were actually admiring the artistry of Gilbert Stuart more than his subject.
Stuart managed to have this Portrait of James Ward displayed at the Royal Academy in London in 1779, a rare honor for an American artist then, given that the colonies were the boonies—and attempting to overthrow British rule. It helped that Stuart’s parents were Loyalists and he was living in London at the time. And that everything from the costume to the canine companion alluded to a former portraitist to the English court, much admired by Stuart’s fellow artists in Britain.
In the end, though, it’s simply a great painting—one of the first acquired by the MIA, in 1916, a year after opening.
Once at MIA is the museum’s year-long series of stories from its past, featuring one archival image each week. Share your story at artsmia.org/100.