Ann Calvert Stuart Robinson (Mrs. William Robinson)

Gift of the sitter's sister, Eleanor Custis Stuart [b. 1796], Alexandria, Virginia, to her great-niece, Rebecca Lynn Webster [b. 1861], Rochester, New York;[1] (Jonce I. McGurk, New York); sold 5 August 1919 to (M. Knoedler & Co., New York);[2] purchased 3 March 1923 by Thomas B. Clarke [1848-1931], New York;[3] his estate; sold as part of the Clarke collection on 29 January 1936, through (M. Knoedler & Co., New York), to The A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, Pittsburgh; gift 1942 to NGA. [1] Letter from Rebecca Lynn Webster, 5 August 1919, to Jonce I. McGurk, New York (typed copy, NGA curatorial file). For their relationship and dates of birth (dates of death are undetermined), see Robert Winder Johnson, _The Ancestry of Rosalie Morris Johnson_, Philadelphia, 1905, 30, 41. According to Jane Stuart, "The Stuart Portraits of Washington," in _Scribner's Monthly_ 12 (July 1876), 373, the portrait was owned by Mrs. George Goldsborough, granddaughter of Mrs. Robinson's half-sister Mrs. Thomas Law. Lawrence Park, _Gilbert Stuart: An Illustrated Descriptive List of his Works, with an Account of his Life by John Hill Morgan and an Appreciation by Royal Cortissoz_, 4 vols., New York, 1926, 650, states, however, that the painting was only on loan to Mrs. Goldsborough, who lived in Talbot County, Maryland. [2] The dated receipt for McGurk's sale to Knoedler is in the NGA curatorial file. [3] The Knoedler invoice dated 28 February 1923 is in the NGA curatorial file; the name of the seller and the date of purchase are recorded in a copy of _Portraits by Early American Painters of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Collected by Thomas B. Clarke_, Exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1928, annotated with information from files of M. Knoedler & Co., NY (copy in NGA curatorial records and in NGA library).