Beschreibung:

After Gilbert Charles Stuart Commodore Stephen Decatur, circa 1806-13 Oil on canvas 30 1/4 x 25 inches Provenance: Lucretia Perry (Mrs. Henry Fairfield Osborn), New York [With] Jonce McGurk, Baltimore, MD, circa 1919 Charles Allen Munn, West Orange, NJ, circa 1919-1924 Bequest of the above to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1924 Literature: Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin Harry B. Wehle, Metropolitan Museum Bulletin, 1925, xx, p. 22, questions the Stuart attribution and suggests it is a copy by John Trumbull or Rembrandt Peale Lawrence Park Gilbert Stuart New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1926, I, pp. 273f, no. 229, mentions the present work as a copy Bryson Burroughs The Metropolitan Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1931, p. 144, refers to the work as a copy after Stuart Albert TenEyck Gardner and Stuart Feld, American Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I, Painters born by 1915, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1965, p. 99, illus. William H. Truettner, Connoisseur 171 (August 1969), pp. 271-272 John Caldwell and Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume 1, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born by 1815, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994, pp. 197-198, illus. p. 198 Once thought to be the work of Gilbert Stuart the present work is now considered to be a nineteenth-century copy by an unknown hand. The authorship of the painting had been questioned as early as 1925, the year after the work had been bequeathed to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1926, Lawrence Park author of Gilbert Stuart referred to it as a copy. Yet questions about the work, and about the portrait from which this copy was made, have continued through the years. It is now believed that the present work is a copy after the portrait of Decatur by Stuart that is included in the collection of Independent National Historical Park in Philadelphia. That likeness was painted in 1806, but it was altered before 1847, when Susan Decatur, his widow, donated it to the historic site. She hired James Alexander Simpson to repaint the uniform so Decatur would appear as he had in 1813, when he was honored by the city of Philadelphia and was inducted into the Society of the Cincinnati. The present work, likely painted after 1813 and before 1847, depicts the original uniform and is much closer to the Philadelphia work than to other known versions. C Property of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Old relining. Two or three 1/4 x 1/4 inch spots of inpaint, one on the vest, two in the hair. Grime in craquelure.