The Right Honorable John Foster
Framed: 94 1/2 x 70 1/2 inches (240.03 x 179.07 cm)
- 211
Gilbert Stuart, Portraitist of the Young Republic, 1755-1828, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., June 28-August 20, 1967 and Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, R.I., September 9-October 15, 1967, no. 16.
Gilbert Stuart, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 21, 2004-January 16, 2005 and National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., March 27, 2005-July 31, 2005, no. 20.
Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design, 1690-1840, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, March 17-June 21, 2015, no. 126.
John Foster was speaker of the Irish House of Commons, and Stuart painted him in the opulence and splendor appropriate for a man of his position. The artist alternated between a more controlled brush, evident in the face and wig, and his signature flourishes, which delineate the waistcoat buttons and gold trim of the robe. Stuart later used the pose and general composition of this portrait in reverse for his well known, 1796 full-length image of George Washington.
To John Foster (the sitter);
to Thomas Henry Foster (later Thomas Skeffington, son of the sitter), by descent, 1828;
to John Skeffington (grandson of the sitter), by descent, 1843;
to Clotworthy John Eyre Foster Skeffington (great-grandson of the sitter), by descent, 1863;
to Major Algernon William John Clotworthy Skeffington (great-great-grandson of the sitter), Collon, County Louth, Ireland, by descent, 1905;
to (R. Langton Douglas, London);
to (M. Knoedler & Co., London and New York, and Scott & Fowles, London, February 1922);
to (M. Knoedler & Co., New York, 1922);
to NAMA, 1930.
Saunders Newsletter (Dublin, Ire.), April 1791 (see below, Mount, Gilbert Stuart, 149; and Barratt and Miles, Gilbert Stuart, 85n3).
John Chaloner Smith, British Mezzotinto Portraits (London: Henry Sotheran & Co., 1879), 2:631.
Walter G. Strickland, Dictionary of Irish Artists (Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1913), 2:415.
Mantle Fielding, “Paintings by Gilbert Stuart Not Mentioned in Mason’s Life of Stuart,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 38 (July 1914), 322–23.
Lawrence Park, Gilbert Stuart: An Illustrated Descriptive List of His Works Compiled by Lawrence Park; with an Account of His Life by John Hill Morgan and an Appreciation by Royal Cortissoz (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1926), 1:40, 328–29, 3:179.
“Nelson Museum Puts $500,000 More into Art,” New York Herald-Tribune, May 20, 1930, 15.
“‘Portrait of the Rt. Hon. John Foster, afterwards Lord Oriel,’ by Gilbert Stuart,” Art News 28 (May 31, 1930), 6 (as Portrait of the Rt. Hon. John Foster, afterwards Lord Oriel).
“American Painting,” Art Digest 8 (December 1, 1933), 16.
“The Acquisitions,” Art Digest 8 (December 1, 1933), 16, 22 (as Portrait of Hon. John Foster).
“The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art: Complete Catalogue of Paintings and Drawings,” Art News 32 (December 9, 1933), 28 (as Portrait of Hon. John Foster).
Handbook of the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art (Kansas City, Mo.: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1933), 122 (as Portrait of the Right Honorable John Foster), 123, 138 (as Portrait of Hon. John Foster).
The William Rockhill Nelson Collection, 2nd ed. (Kansas City, Mo.: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1941), 149, 150, 166 (as Portrait of the Hon. John Foster).
The William Rockhill Nelson Collection, 3rd. ed. (Kansas City, Mo.: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1949), 196.
Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4th ed. (Kansas City, Mo.: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 257.
Charles Merrill Mount, “The Irish Career of Gilbert Stuart,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society 6 (January–March 1963), 17.
The Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (London: Oxford University Press, 1963–64), 7:497.
Charles Merrill Mount, Gilbert Stuart: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1964), 149–50, 204, 359.
Gilbert Stuart, Portraitist of the Young Republic, 1755–1828, exh. cat. (Providence: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1967), 60–61.
Walter George Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1969), 2:410, 415 (as John Foster, the Speaker).
Ross E. Taggart and George L. McKenna, eds. Arts of the Occident. Vol. 1. Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts. 5th ed. (Kansas City, Mo.: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 255 (as Rt. Hon. John Foster).
Donald Hoffmann, “Gallery Receives Revolutionary Gift: Stuart Portrait Captures
Vitality of Early Doctor,” Kansas City
Star, December 27, 1981, 3F.
Ross E. Taggart, “American Paintings in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo.,” Antiques 122 (November 1982), 1028, 1031.
Shepherd Brooks and Jay Gates, “An American Portrait: Dr. William Aspinwall by Gilbert Stuart,” Bulletin (Nelson Atkins Museum of Art) 5 (July 1983), 9–11.
Richard McLanathan, Gilbert Stuart (New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1986), 71–72, 74.
Hugh R. Crean, “Gilbert Stuart and the Politics of Fine Arts Patronage in Ireland, 1787–1793: A Social and Cultural Study,” Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1990, 260–64, 368, 399–400 (as John Foster).
Henry Adams, Handbook of American Paintings in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1991), 26–28.
Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collections. 6th ed. (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 232 (as Portrait of the Right Honorable John Foster).
Michael Churchman and Scott Erbes, High Ideals and Aspirations: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 1933–1993 (Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 25 (as Portrait of the Rt. Hon. John Foster).
Kristie C. Wolferman, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: Culture Comes to Kansas City (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 140–41, 143.
Dorinda Evans, The
Genius of Gilbert Stuart (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1999), xi, 67.
69, 143n18.
George Washington: A National Treasure, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, 2002), 48, 87–88.
Carrie Rebora Barratt, “Gilbert Stuart in England,” Antiques 166 (November 2004), 115, 117n14 (as John Foster).
Carrie Rebora Barratt and Ellen G. Miles, Gilbert Stuart, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), 77, 82–87.
Fintan Cullen, The Irish Face: Redefining the Irish Portrait (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2004), 153–54, 165, 174, 221.
Margaret C. Conrads, ed., The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American Paintings to 1945 (Kansas City, Mo.: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007), 1: 505–509, 2: 228–229.
William Laffan and Christopher Monkhouse, eds., Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design, 1690–1840
(Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2015), 48, 73, 234.
