Revolutionary Liaisons: Gilbert Stuart's Portraits of Sarah Morton as the First Woman of Ideas in American Art

When poet and essayist Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton sat for Gilbert Stuart, the preeminent American portraitist of the early republic, a revolutionary alliance was born. Stuart painted Morton three times; the series is provocative. Both figures were objects of gossip during their lifetimes—Stuart for his proclivity for drink, snuff, and general dissipation. Morton for a public sex scandal that