(1754 - 1817), s. of Sir John Stewart of Allanbank; m. 1778 Frances Coutts; suc. fa. 1796 as 4th Bt.
1779 - 80 Rome ( - 12 Apr. 1779), Naples (14 - 21 Apr.), Sicily (29 Apr. - May), Naples ( - Jun. - Jul. 1779), Rome (by 1 Jan. - 19 Apr. 1780)
Soon after his marriage to an heiress of the Coutts banking family, Stewart took his wife and two of his sisters, Margaret and Elizabeth, to Italy. In April 1779 he was in Rome with Thomas Bowdler observing Holy Week. Immediately afterwards they went with Rowland Burdon, John Soane, Henry Greswolde Lewis and John Patteson on an expedition to Sicily. Leaving Naples on 21 April, they arrived at Palermo on the 29th (see also Patteson); Bowdler and Stewart made a briefer tour than the others (Bowdler was back in Leghorn by 10 June). Stewart apparently stayed in Naples, where Soane, ever seeking a rich client, was attending him in July and visiting him almost daily in Rome the following winter.1
In January 1780 John Hippisley reported Stewart living in Rome en Prince, 'but he complains that his wife's Escutcheon, being an Heiress, obscures too much of his own Shield ... he spends his money, & has the consolation to be very comfortably laughed at for his Pains. However our friend the Abb? [Grant] dines every day there'.2 He was presumably the Stewart whom Hippisley introduced to the painter Thomas Jones in Rome on 13 January.3 On 7 March 1780 Hippisley secretly married in Rome Margaret, one of the Stewart sisters ('not the red-haired one'; see Hippisley). The Stewarts left Rome on 19 April, Stewart incensed at the behaviour of Thomas Jenkins as a banker.4 See also Elizabeth Cicciaporci.
1. Du Prey, Soane 1982, 113. 2. Pembroke Papers, 1:376. 3. Jones Memoirs, 93. 4. Pembroke Papers, 1:460.