Captain John Gell

Captain John Gell

Gilbert Stuart

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In 1785 the British naval officer John Gell (1738–1806) had just completed his duty on the seventy-gun Monarca, which he had commanded in a series of battles against the French. For this portrait, Stuart used as a model Sir Joshua Reynolds’s heroic "Commodore Augustus Keppel" (1752; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK). In homage to Reynolds, Stuart employed a combination of fine and slapdash brushwork, conveying an image of both heroism and naturalism. He exhibited "Captain John Gell" at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 1785, when the British portraitist John Hoppner commented that it was “admirably well-painted without trickery to dazzle the eye or mislead the judgment.”

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.