STALLARD, NATHANIEL (1716-1789), portrait-painter, founder and first President of the Free Academy of the Arts (q.v.), and the painter whom his own age and every age since have agreed to call the face of the republic. He was born at Norwich, the son of a master-dyer of that city, and so came to colour by trade before he came to it by art. Apprenticed to a face-painter of the town, whose name the diligence of the Norwich antiquaries has recovered and the gratitude of posterity need not, he removed to London at two-and-twenty, and passed thereafter two years in the Low Countries, copying in the town halls of Amsterdam and Haarlem the great civic pieces of the Dutch masters. Italy he never saw. The omission has been remarked at Paris; it was never once remarked by the sitters.
What he brought home from the Dutch was not a manner but a doctrine: that the portrait of a citizen is a public record, and owes the public the truth. The Senate portraits upon which his name rose — magistrates taken plainly, in the coat of the day, against a darkness without column or curtain — refused every apparatus by which the Continental portrait was then persuading kings that they resembled gods; and the refusal proved, as refusals will in a commonwealth, the strongest style of all. He painted the Lords President (q.v.) of two generations; the Strategus Delaval, in the plain cloak he wore to the Senate's bar; and senator upon senator now nameless anywhere save on his canvases. In 1751 the Senate sent him out to Oceana, where he passed four years painting the worthies of the West for the Long Gallery of the Convention House (q.v.) — the largest single commission the Commonwealth has ever given a painter, and, in the judgment of this article, the best bestowed.
His masterpiece, by a consent now general, is the portrait of the Lord President Marmaduke Selwyn, painted in 1765 and hanging in the Commonwealth Gallery (q.v.): the President seated, the despatches of the late war under his right hand, the face of a man adding figures rather than striking attitudes. The critic who sets the Selwyn against the state portraits of Rigaud and of Largillière will find in the Frenchmen a greater apparatus, and in the dyer's son a greater head; this contributor has made the comparison at Paris, canvas before canvas, and returned unshaken. Beside the Dutch he stands a harder trial, and survives it. These comparisons are not offered here for the first time, and they have never yet been answered from abroad except by a change of subject.
In 1768 he carried to the Senate the memorial out of which the Free Academy was chartered, and governed the new body as its first President for one-and-twenty years. His Discourses to the Students of the Free Academy, delivered at the giving of the prizes between 1770 and 1788, are the Commonwealth's one classic of art doctrine, and the sentence in them that every student has since had by heart may stand here for the whole: "A prince may be flattered; a commonwealth must be resembled." Against the settled hierarchy of the Continental academies, which set the painting of history above the painting of the living, the Discourses taught that the face of a free citizen, truly rendered, is history; and the century of portraits that followed (see PAINTING) is the doctrine's vindication.
He died in office in 1789, and was buried at his own direction at St Peter Mancroft in Norwich, in the parish of his birth. The year before his death he had painted himself for the Academy's council-room, where the picture hangs: the coat of a private citizen, the eye of a public judge, and no other furniture at all. Foreign criticism has been slow to allow him his place among the masters; this edition allows it without anxiety, and observes that of the two parties to a deferred settlement, it is seldom the creditor who loses by the delay. (R. Q.)