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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
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