Robert L. Stuart (1806–1882)

Oil on linen

Overall: 49 x 37 x 1 in. ( 124.5 x 94 x 2.5 cm )

The Robert L. Stuart Collection, the gift of his widow Mrs. Mary Stuart

S-70

Robert Leighton Stuart (1806–1882) built his fortune in the sugar industry. With his brother Alexander, he founded R.L. & A. Stuart (est. 1828), which developed into the largest candy manufactory and sugar refinery in New York City. By 1835, the refinery branch of the business—driven by an innovative steam- driven refining process—had grown to such proportions that the brothers abandoned the candy trade and built two multi-story refineries at the corners of Greenwich and Chambers Streets and Greenwich and Reade Streets. Stuart’s success in business fed his philanthropic efforts. As the New York Times reported upon his passing in 1882, “Mr. Stuart gave away large sums of money to benevolent objects, and in the most unostentatious manner.” With his wife Mary McCrea (1815–1891), he donated to Princeton College and the Presbyterian Hospital and supported Union efforts in the Civil War. He served as president of the Presbyterian Hospital, as president of the board of trustees of the Young Men’s Christian Association, and as a leading member of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. He also co-founded and served as president of the American Museum of Natural History. Stuart had long been collecting books as well as natural history specimens like shells and minerals, and in the 1850s, he began collecting art. He commissioned paintings directly from such contemporary artists as John Frederick Kensett, Jasper F. Cropsey, and Asher B. Durand, and Frederic Edwin Church and purchased additional works from art galleries, National Academy of Design exhibitions, and “Pro Patria” or Sanitary Fair sales. The collection reflected Stuart’s devout religiosity; his interest, developed through his support of the Union cause during the Civil War, in African American subjects; his investment in the art of the United States; and his later passion for European academic painting. As the collection grew, the Stuarts planned for a new mansion to house it: a second empire-style house at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 68th Street. Designed by J. William Schickel, it featured wrought-iron balconies, bay windows, and a mansard roof with dormer windows and cast-iron cresting. The New York Times proclaimed during construction that it would “prove one of the most notable ornaments of the avenue.” While Stuart passed away the year before the home’s completion, Mary McCrea Stuart finished the project. An 1883 book titled Artistic Houses: being a series of interior views of a number of the most beautiful and celebrated homes in the United States… described the gallery as “an oblong room with the corners cut off, devoted to the late Mr. Stuart’s fine collections of modern oil-paintings and of minerals, its chief architectural feature being the series of ebonized-oak cabinets below the picture-line.” Above the picture-line was a dramatic salon-style display of sixty-six canvases from the vast art collection, with the entire space “copiously illuminated by a sky-light.” The remaining paintings hung throughout the house, mainly in the halls of the lower three floors. Stuart’s paintings would eventually find their home at the New-York Historical Society. In 1892, Mary McCrea Stuart bequeathed the collection to the New York Public Library. In 1944, the Library in turn passed stewardship of the collection over to the New-York Historical Society. Stuart had been a member of New-York Historical, and in 1885 his widow had made a sizeable anonymous donation to the institution for the purchase of a new site—paving the way, in a peculiar twist of fate, for the Central Park West building that would welcome the Stuart Collection nearly a half-century later.

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