Andrew Charles Stuart 1831-1898 Series, bulk: 1860 - 1880, 1865 - 1998

Alexander Charles Stuart 1831-1898 was born in Campbeltown, Scotland and raised in Glasgow. According to his own account, Stuart studied engineering and medicine in Scotland and served in the British Army. In 1861, he emigrated to the United States and joined the United States Marines. During the American Civil War, Stuart was second Assistant Engineer in the Union Navy. While serving in this position, he made watercolor sketches of naval ships and sea battles, and painted oil on canvas works such as Naval Engagement Between Rebel Ram Albemarle and Union Vessels (1864). After the war, he settled in Philadelphia, and then later in Chester, Pennsylvania. He married and had a total of eight children.

Like Glasgow, the cities of Philadelphia and Chester, Pennsylvania, as well as Wilmington, Delaware, boasted robust shipbuilding industries. Stuart was hired to paint ship portraits for documentation and advertising by William Cramp & Sons in Philadelphia, John Roach & Sons and its child company the Delaware River Shipbuilding and Ironworks in Chester, Pennsylvania, and The Harlan & Hollingsworth Company in Wilmington, Delaware.

Stuart learned oil and watercolor painting by copying from magazines, popular reproductions, and other artists’ work. To ensure a steady income, he frequently replicated his own work of subjects that proved popular with local clients.

Sometime around 1880, Stuart abandoned the ship as a subject in his work. During the final decades of his life, Stuart suffered from alcoholism and intermittent poverty. For a time, he associated with the landscape painter Henry Lea Tatnall and other Wilmington artists, but ultimately ended these connections. Stuart attempted unsuccessfully to market his paintings in New York, and, during a brief stint in Florida, sought work by claiming to be a physician before finally returning to his family in Wilmington. In the 1890s, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, with his daughter, Amy Moon, and died there in 1898. After his death, Stuart’s personal reputation in Wilmington subdued serious interest in his work. Two exhibitions, one at John Wanamaker’s department store in 1954, and another at the Brandywine Museum of Art in 1997, produced publications that brought recognition to Stuart’s place in the genre of American ship portraiture and Brandywine region art history.