(Rose M. de Forest [Mrs. Augustus De Forest], New York); purchased 6 December 1921 by Thomas B. Clarke [1848-1931], New York;[1] 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 1947 to NGA. [1] The name of the seller and the date of purchase are recorded in a copy of _Portraits by Early American Artists 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). 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, 372-373, published the portrait as of Cyrus Griffin, with the false provenance provided by Rose de Forest, who claimed that the portrait was handed down from Cyrus Griffin's daughter Mary to her daughter Eliza Waller and her son Matthew Page Waller. The typed copy of a letter to "Mr. de Forest," dated 16 April 1926 and purporting to be from Louisa Cosnahan, Dr. Waller's niece, stated that the portrait hung in Waller's home for many years (NGA curatorial file; the original letter was not provided). This letter, provenance, and sitter identification were proven false by William Sawitzky and by Anna Wells Rutledge and James W. Lane, "110 Paintings in the Clarke Collection," unpublished typescript, NGA Department of Curatorial Records, 1952; see William Sawitzky, "Some Unrecorded Portraits by Gilbert Stuart, Part Three: Portraits Painted in America," _Art in America_ 21, no. 3 (June 1933), 92-93, and lecture notes for his class at New York University, c. 1940, Rutledge and Lane 1952, 1-2, and William P. Campbell's memo of 11 January 1966 to John Walker (NGA curatorial file).