1 INTRODUCTION

Many American portraitists working on wood panel in the first half of the 19th century created an intentionally textured surface. This practice was discussed by Goldberg (1993). During technical examination, similar scoring patterns were discovered on all eight of the 19th-century portrait paintings on panel at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The panels are dated between ca. 1810 and ca. 1832. The six artists represented are Gilbert Stuart, John Wesley Jarvis, James Frothingham, Matthew Harris Jouett, Samuel Lovett Waldo, and the partnership of Samuel Lovett Waldo and William Jewett. Technical examination of these paintings clearly proves that there was no set formula regarding wood type or scoring pattern. An assessment of whether or not scoring was applied directly into the panel or into the ground layer was made based on the technical evidence. Observation of a large range of scored panels by Gilbert Stuart in other collections revealed many variations in his scoring patterns. An early dated example suggests that Stuart may have started the fashion for the technique.