Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/446

THOMAS JEFFERSON IN 1800. AGE 57. PAINTED BY GILBERT STUART.

From the original portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart, now owned by Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine. Canvas, 41 by 49 inches. The history of Stuart's portraits of Jefferson cannot be written in a brief note. There has been endless controversy as to how many times and when Jefferson sat to Stuart, and which pictures are the original portraits painted from life. The entire story is an interesting one, throwing strong side lights upon the characters of painter and subject. Suffice it to say that Stuart painted Jefferson's portrait from life three times. The first was painted in May, 1800, at Philadelphia, and the second and third in 1805, at Washington. The result of the first sitting is the elaborate and superb picture here reproduced. The second sitting gave the portrait that Jefferson finally obtained from the painter after much difficulty, in the summer of 1821; and the third sitting produced the profile à la antique spoken of in the introduction. Jefferson preferred the first picture, and for it he paid the painter $100. But it was no uncommon thing with Stuart to get pay for a picture that he never delivered, or did not deliver until he was paid for it a second time. Thus Stuart parted with the first portrait to the Hon. James Bowdoin, who subsequently bequeathed it to the college that bears his name. He then put Jefferson off with trifling excuses and prevarications until it is extremely doubtful if the portrait finally sent to Jefferson was even the original of the second sitting; it is more probably a late replica. It is now at Edgehill, near Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of the Randolphs, where the writer saw it in September, 1897.