GILBERT STUART once said, in a wry comment on the grand work of his mentor, Benjamin West, that ";no one would paint history who could do a portrait." Stuart went on from there to produce a great and unique visual record of American history expressed in portraits. This week's cover of President James Monroe is part of that record.* President Monroe sat for Stuart in Boston early in July 1817, four months after he had taken office in his first term, and while he was on a trip inspecting military installations. The Essex Register of Salem, Mass., in an item from Boston dated July 10. 1817, reported (using a sometime spelling of the painter's name): "Early the last three mornings, previous to his departure, the President has had sittings at Mr. Stewart's room." The Newburyport Herald later shed more light on the trouble a President would take to reach a painter in that era: ";A few days after the arrival of Mr. Monroe in Boston, he went out early one morning in his carriage to sit for his portrait to Mr. Stuart. Not knowing his dwelling, he stopped a country man seated on his cart, and enquired for Mr. Stuart's house. The country man looked steadfastly at him. 'It is the President, I vow,' said he to himself, and instinctively taking off his hat. he gave three loud and hearty cheers, and drove off, leaving the President unanswered and astonished.'' What Stuart produced from these sittings was a bust portrait on wood. The painting used for this week's cover (oil on canvas, 40 1/4 in. by 32 in.) is one of Stuart's famed replicas that he did from his originals for the plain purpose of making money (perpetually in financial trouble, Stuart fled England in 1787 owing -L-80 for snuff, and died in 1828 leaving a pile of debts and a priceless heritage of paintings).

This oil was one of a set of the first Presidents done by Stuart on commission from a Boston picture dealer. The set was in storage in the Library of Congress when in 1851, a fire destroyed all except the Monroe portrait and that of President James Madison. Eventually, the Monroe oil came into the possession of Seth Low, president of Manhattan's Columbia University (1890-1901) and second mayor of New York City (1902-04), who bequeathed it to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum took possession of the painting in 1929, in what was believed to be the original frame, and it hangs at the American Wing.

Painter Stuart, who always stubbornly insisted on putting to canvas exactly what he saw, also left behind a stern point of view that can serve journalists as well as painters. To a proud husband who complained that Stuart had failed to capture his wife's elusive beauty, the artist replied: "What damned business is this of a portrait painter? You bring him a potato and expect he will paint a peach?"

*And the second Stuart portrait to appear on the cover of TIME. First: George Washington, issue of July 6, 1953

*From a pen-and-ink sketch drawn on the back of a letter to a friend, probably at about the time he painted Monroe.

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