Most people know Gilbert Stuart primarily – even only – for his iconic portraits of George Washington. Indeed, a Stuart portrait of the first president appears on the $1 bill. One of the many exciting things about the Metropolitan Museum’s stupendous new exhibition of the paintings of Stuart is that it shows us a Stuart beyond Washington – it presents the portraitist extraordinaire of the early republic, the painter so renowned that Washington sat for him in the first place.

The exhibition divides into seven sections, based on the places where Stuart worked in his peripatetic career. Stuart was born in Rhode Island in 1755,and grew up in Newport, where as a boy he began to draw and paint. He apprenticed with a visiting Scottish painter, Cosmo Alexander, and accompanied him to Edinburgh. After Alexander unexpectedly died, Stuart set up as a portrait painter in Newport, but with the outbreak of revolution, business dried up, and Stuart went to London. There he came under the tutelage of the American painter Benjamin West, who had made a great success in London. Though Stuart assisted West on large-scale history paintings and executed West’s design for the ceiling of Somerset House, the younger painter eventually opted for the kind of portraiture he admired in Reynolds and Gainsborough.

At the Met, after a small section on Newport and Scotland, we quickly go to London. My favorite of the several impressive works in this section is Stuart’s Rubens-esque self-portrait from 1778, painted shortly after he began working for West. Also of note is “The Skater,” from 1782, Stuart’s first full-length portrait. The figure of William Grant, delicately balanced on his ice skates, has great charm, and its popularity at the Royal Academy led to many commissions for Stuart.

This gallery also contains the “Boydell pictures.” Print publisher and arts patron John Boydell commissioned Stuart to paint 15 portraits of artists whom Boydell worked with. These include portraits of West, and – by far the most striking of the lot – of Joshua Reynolds. Apparently, some people were taken aback by how directly Stuart engaged his subject, with no attempt at prettification. Reynolds, for his part, delighted in the picture. We see throughout this show a surprising number of unembellished portraits, some with an almost Eakins-esque quality.

The English regarded Stuart as the best of the new generation of portraitists. He enjoyed a fashionable London lifestyle and married an Englishwoman. They eventually had 12 children, and supporting them required a lot of portraits. In 1787, Stuart moved from London to Dublin, where Reynolds had arranged for him to paint portraits for the Duke of Rutland. The Duke died just as Stuart arrived in town, but the painter nonetheless remained for six years in Dublin, where he had a virtual monopoly as a society portraitist. But he had kept an eye on his native land, and he hatched a plan to go to America to paint portraits of George Washington – portraits for which Stuart felt there was a lucrative market.

For a year Stuart worked in New York. Here he made portraits of local worthies, including Henry Cruger, William Bayard, Robert R. Livingston, and John Jay. These and many of the other American subjects in the show form a splendid companion to the gallery of portraits that is part of the New-York Historical Society’s Hamilton show on the other side of Central Park. In New York, Stuart earned recognition as the best portraitist the city had seen in some time. The works in the New York gallery show remarkable range. The portraits of the ultra-fashionable and pretentious Josef de Jaudenes y Nebot and of his wife, the former Matilda Stoughton, exuberantly depict the couple’s finery, especially that of the lavishly coiffed and attired Matilda. Yet right next to them are portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Yates, shown by Stuart with Protestant severity. Looking at the Jaudenes and Yates pictures together, it’s hard to discern a “Stuart style” so much as the works of a technically gifted artist willing to do what the commission required.

Stuart moved on to Philadelphia, then the capital of painting in America. He stayed in that city for nine years, earning the patronage of William Bingham, perhaps the richest man in the city. The Philadelphia room at the Met contains portraits of Bingham and of his wife, the former Anne Willing. She was a self-assured, fashionable, strong-willed woman whose qualities Stuart captured with stunning success in one of his very best portraits. But the raison d’etre of the Philadelphia move seems to have been to stalk George Washington, for at this time that city was the national capital.

The Metropolitan devotes a whole gallery to the Washington portraits – fourteen of them. Eight are from the chest up, four are full-length, one is a seated figure, and one is an unfinished seated figure. There is also one unfinished portrait of Martha. Of these, the full-length portraits rivet the attention. Three are identical, showing how Stuart copied his works for sale. Though Stuart painted at least one hundred Washington portraits, the ones brought together at the Metropolitan are fully documented, authentic Stuart works, and represent the first time Stuart’s Washingtons have been brought together for comparative study.

In 1803 Stuart went to live in Washington, D.C. In addition to George Washington, four other presidents – John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe – sat for Stuart, and they are all here, as is Dolley Madison. Finally, we move to Boston, where Stuart lived out the last 23 years of his life. The last of Stuart’s paintings to be shown here is the portrait of Josiah Quincy, from 1824-25.

The accompanying texts focus more on Stuart’s subjects than on his artistic techniques, giving the exhibition the flavor more of a history than an art exhibition. We see in most of the portraits a consummate command of the fluent, dashing strokes we associate with 18th-century English portraiture. Some pictures have a distinct flavor of Reynolds or Gainsborough. Yet there is another vein in some of the works, a directness, an unflinching candor. We see it in the portrait of Reynolds, in the portrait of Jay, and in a portrait of Helena Lawrence Holmes Penington. One image, an unfinished portrait of Sarah Morton, the poet who was Stuart’s close friend, is perhaps the show’s sole unabashedly personal work, and it is quite moving.

A companion show at the Metropolitan, “George Washington: Man, Myth, Monument,” collects from the museum’s collections numerous items bearing Washington’s image. This is a delightful gathering, including a Rembrandt Peale portrait of Washington, Ceracchi and Greenough marble busts, porcelains (including a vase produced by Greenpoint’s Union Porcelain Works), figurines, plates, embroideries, medallions, etchings and lithographs, and a tapestry depicting Washington taking the oath of office on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street. Two things impressed me most. One is an English oil-on-glass painting from 1797. It’s based on a print that was popular in London at the time. This caricature shows a very fat, goofy faced, bug-eyed President Washington – reminding us that artists did not universally seek to apotheosize him. The other item is a photograph, strangely enough. It’s a daguerreotype by the famous Southworth and Hawes, from around 1850. It’s of a lovely young girl in a gallery pensively peering at a Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington. It sums up the whole business, really. How many young people over the years gazed upon Stuart’s Washington and acquired an indelible mental image of the Father of His Country?

The Stuart portraits, of Washington and others, are noble indeed. The range is surprising, and the exhibition is a marvel.