Gilbert Stuart, at
Boston, got some systematic instruction and ended by painting very
passable portraits.

Some amusing stories are told of the persistency with which he hunted
for orders. In 1842, Charles Dickens visited America for the first time,
and while his ship was yet out of sight of land, the pilot clambered on
board, and after him Alexander, who begged the great novelist for the
privilege of painting his portrait. Dickens, amused at his enterprise,
consented, and Alexander's studio, during the sittings, became the
centre of literary Boston. It is a curious commentary upon Alexander's
development that, after a trip or two abroad, he professed to find the
crudities of his native land unbearable, and spent his last years in
Italy.

A third self-made artist was John Neagle, whose portrait of Gilbert
Stuart, which heads this chapter, is the best that exists. Neagle was
apprenticed, when a boy, to a coach-painter, and soon was spending his
spare time practicing a more ambitious branch of the painting
profession. As soon as he was through his apprenticeship he set up as a
portrait painter, and travelled over the mountains to Lexington,
Kentucky, hoping to fare as well as Harding had. But he found the field
already pre-empted by two other painters, one of whom, Matthew Jouett,
was an artist of considerable skill.

Neagle had a hard time getting back home again, but he finally reached
Philadelphia, and spent most of the remainder of his life there.
Practice and study gave him a certain skill; he visited Boston and had
the advantage of some instruction from Gilbert Stuart, but his work
remained to the end inferior to either Harding's or Alexander's.

Henry Inman had a more varied talent than any of these men, for besides
portraits he painted genre scenes and landscapes, and excelled in all of
them. At the age of fourteen, he had been apprenticed to a painter by
the name of John Wesley Jarvis, a picturesque character, better
remembered by his anecdotes than by his work; and when his
apprenticeship was over he began painting on his own account in New
York and afterwards in Philadelphia. For a time his popularity was very
great and his income large; but reverses came, ill health followed, and
he died in poverty at the age of forty-five.

It is worth noting that, up to this time, practically no landscapes had
been produced by American artists. A few of them had tried their hands
at landscape work, but soon abandoned