Bishop Jean-Louis Anne Magdelaine Lefebvre de Cheverus

In 1823 word reached Boston that Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus, the city's first Catholic bishop, was being called home to France to take the diocese of Montauban. He had come to Boston in 1796, a priest who had fled the Revolution by way of England, and he had spent 27 years with a small Catholic congregation in an overwhelmingly Protestant town. A petition signed by 226 Bostonians asked that he be allowed to stay.

Before he sailed that autumn, a Boston woman, Mary Babcock Gore, commissioned this portrait from Gilbert Stuart, who was 67 and still in high demand. Cheverus went on to become archbishop of Bordeaux and, in 1836, the year he died, a cardinal. The canvas was bequeathed to the museum in 1921. A second version, sold at auction in 2009, was given the following year to Cheverus High School in Portland, Maine, a school that carries his name.