TWO WOMEN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. GILBERT STUART'S PORTRAITS OF WOMEN. BY CHARLES HENRY HART. MARY WHITE-MRS. ROBERT MORRIS. STE TRANGELY enough the title "First Lady in the Land" was not bestowed originally upon the wife of the President of the United States, but was given to Mrs. Robert Morris, the spouse of our first great minister of finance, in the days of the Confederation, she of whom a local poet wrote, after seeing her at her first assembly, in 1767, when she was in her eighteenth year: In lovely White's most pleasing form Mrs. Morris was the daughter of Colonel Thomas White, and only sister of the revered Bishop White of Pennsylvania. Carefully trained in all womanly accomplishments, she was fitted to fill, with ease and dignity and grace, the high station to which she was called, before she was twenty, in becoming the wife of the future financier of the American Revolution. Robert Morris was his wife's senior by fifteen years, and his foremost position, as a sagacious merchant, foreshadowed the eminence he was to attain in the history of this country, by his skilful dealing with that most difficult problem, the public credit. The appointment by Congress of Mr. Morris, as Superintendent of Finance, with his wealth, ability, and social distinction, made his home the center of all the amenity and civility of the day, and it was as hostess over this noted establishment that Mrs. Morris shone preeminent. The Marquis de Chastellux, the Abbé Robin, Citizen Mazzei, the Prince de Broglie, the Chevalier de la Luzerne, and others, have each recorded some agreeable memory of Mrs. Morris. And Washington, on more than one occasion, made her house his home. When Mrs. Washington journeyed from Mount Vernon to New York, after the inauguration of the first President, she stopped in Philadelphia and took Mrs. Morris with her, in her carriage, to New York, and at the first levee Mrs. Morris was given the place of honor on the right of the President's wife, a distinction always accorded her at public functions during Washington's administration. When the capital was removed to Philadelphia, it was Mrs. Morris's home that was given up for the President's house. But life was not to be all sunshine and brightness for her. Mr. Morris took up millions of acres of unseated lands in different States of the Union, which he formed into a land company; but the speculation was disastrous, and he was cast into a debtors' prison, where he was kept three years and a half. During his confinement his faithful and devoted wife was his constant companion, visiting him daily in prison, and dining at his cell table. Mr. Morris survived his imprisonment five years, and Mrs. Morris survived him twenty-one years. Upon her death a contemporary wrote of her: "After having enjoyed without arrogance the wealth and the honors of early and middle life, she descended without repining to the privations incident to the reverses of fortune toward its close." Without the attraction of great personal beauty, Mrs. Morris was tall, graceful, and commanding, with a stately dignity of manner, which ever made a controlling impression upon all with whom she was brought in contact. Stuart's portrait of her is said to have been the last female head that he painted, but I think the statement very doubtful, as the quality of the work belongs to Stuart's middle and best period. In addition, the picture was left unfinished, and remained in the painter's possession until his death, which were the same conditions attending a picture Stuart painted of Mrs. Morris's two daughters, which he would not finish and deliver, but slashed across the faces, owing to some unfavorable comment that was made upon it by Mr. Morris. There fore I believe these pictures to have been painted about the same time that Stuart painted Robert Morris, which was before his great misfortune, in 1795. The portrait of Mrs. Morris, which is fresh and pure and beautifully painted, was purchased from the artist's family, in 1836, by J. P. Beaumont, and at the sale of his collection, in 1870, was bought by Mr. James Lenox, and is now in the Lenox Gallery, New York Public Library. MARIA SNOWDEN-MRS. PETER MEIRCKEN. WITH this portrait of Mrs. Meircken the series of "Portraits of Women" painted by Gilbert Stuart, America's master painter, will close.1 It has been not only a very great satisfaction to have THE CENTURY'S generous support in making the world familiar with these beautiful works of the genius of Stuart, but it is a great privilege to have been the means of doing this justice to one of the accepted masters of the painter's art. Yet this could not have been accomplished adequately without the aid of Mr. Henry Wolf, who has given to the work of putting these pictures upon wood his best efforts. He has with great skill preserved the method and manner of the painter, and given a keen sense of Stuart's marvelous color, with a preservation of the "values" that would seem, but for his achievement, impossible to give in black and white. Stuart has preserved for us in the portrait of the mother. It has been, I am quite sure, a great surprise to many persons to find how delicately and tenderly Stuart painted a woman's portrait. His masculine work is so full of masculinity that few knew how rich in femininity his feminine work was. The running study of his life and genius, that has been given in the preceding articles, has shown Stuart to have been a many-sided character in his mental and physical temperament. He could be as gruff as a bear and as sweet as a woman; as ill-mannered as a twentieth-century youth and as courtly as a knight of old; as unscrupulous as a tricky moneylender and as honorable as a judge. And in everything he was lavish. He was a man of extremes: always hot or cold; never temperate. He could be dainty even to effeminacy, and gross almost to brutality. His art was, of course, imbued with these characteristics to a greater or less degree, and they enable us to understand why his men were so robust and his women so refined, why his portraits were never of a class, but always of the individual. He understood it all,-all the different grades and degrees,—and when painting, he dipped his brush into the character he wanted with the same facility and precision with which he took the paint off his palette. Stuart's execution was most rapid, to which are due the crispness and brilliancy of his work. He painted quite eight hundred portraits after his return to this country, which would be about two portraits a month during the thirty-five years he lived; but as he painted very little in the latter years of his life, it can be seen how rapidly he worked. And the portrait of Maria Snowden, the wife of Peter Meircken, a leading shippingmerchant of Philadelphia, exhibits in a noted measure the qualities of the painter and the dexterity of the engraver in translating his work. This picture, with its companion portrait of Captain Meircken, was painted in 1798, when the subject was twenty-one and Stuart lived in Germantown, a suburb of Philadelphia, which necessitated a daily drive of a dozen miles for each sitting. It remained in the possession of a daughter, Miss Estelle Meircken, a notable schoolmistress of Philadelphia, until her death, a few years since, when it was bequeathed, as a token of affection, to one of her pupils, Mrs. James Laws, and is now in Washington, D. C. The beauty of Mrs. Meircken was transmitted undiminished to her daughter, who, up to the last, although past eighty years, had the rose bloom upon her cheek, the clearness of complexion, and the brilliant eyes that 1 The preceding portraits appeared in THE CENTURY for November, 1897, April, June, August, September, and October, 1898, March, April, May, June, July, September, and November, 1899. VOL. LXIII.-46. Stuart remained in Philadelphia until 1803, when he took up his residence at the seat of government. Two years later he removed from Washington to Boston, where he continued to reside until his death on July 27, 1828. The saddest part of his story remains to be told. He left his family in abject poverty, so that his body had to be placed in a tomb in the public burying-ground in Boston Common, without even a mark to indicate its final resting-place. The tomb, it is claimed, has been located within a few years, but among its contents which is the dust of Gilbert Stuart can only be guessed at, so that to-day no disciple can make a pious pilgrimage to the grave of America's master painter. |