Sir Robert Prescott Stewart (16 December 1825 – 24 March 1894) was an Irish composer, organist, conductor, and teacher – one of the most influential (classical) musicians in 19th-century Ireland.

In 1846 he succeeded Joseph Robinson as conductor of the University of Dublin Choral Society, another position he held for the rest of his life.

Although he didn't write any symphonies or concertante works for orchestra, he concentrated on vocal music including large-scale cantatas, small-scale glees, songs and a number of organ pieces.

Many of these works are difficult to assess today, because Stewart was extremely critical of his own output, and destroyed a lot of it, including the Ode to Shakespeare.

For most of the twentieth century, Stewart's music was regarded as uninspired and academic, or, as a writer put it in 1989: "[...] generally a model of rectitude, but the absence of that creative spark which, after all, belongs only to a select few in any generation has doomed it to an almost total oblivion from which it is unlikely to emerge.