Thomas Sully

Considered by many scholars and critics to be one of the finest portrait painters in America during the first half of the nineteenth century, Thomas Sully (1783–1872) enjoyed a long and prolific career in his adopted hometown of Philadelphia. Sully was born in England to a family of stage performers. He immigrated with his family to America at the age of nine, settling first in Virginia and then in South Carolina. The family continued to perform on the stage, but Thomas left the troupe, first for school in New York and then for a position in an insurance office in Charleston while still just a boy. His first art lessons came from a classmate in Charleston, Charles Fraser, later a painter of some note in South Carolina. He turned next to his brother-in-law Jean Belzons and then his brother Lawrence, both miniature painters, for art instruction.

After Lawrence’s death in Virginia in 1804, Thomas married his brother’s widow, Sarah, and became stepfather to her three daughters. He then moved north, working for a time in John Trumbull’s studio in New York and traveling to Boston for a critique from Gilbert Stuart. In 1807, he settled with his family in Philadelphia, which would remain his permanent home for the rest of his life. In 1809, with funds from supporters in Philadelphia and a letter of introduction from Charles Willson Peale, Sully went to England, where he received instruction from Benjamin West. While in Europe, he also traveled and studied old master paintings in many fine British collections. After this trip, the artist’s style changed noticeably—it became freer, looser, and more painterly. This transformation often led Sully’s contemporaries to compare him with the fashionable British portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence.

Upon his return to the United States, Sully traveled frequently to cities up and down the east coast. He supported his large family (in addition to his three stepdaughters, Thomas and Sarah had six children of their own) by taking commissions for portraits. The death of Gilbert Stuart in 1828 cemented Sully’s place as the finest portraitist in the nation. The staid republicanism of the early nineteenth century had given way to the Romantic era, and Sully’s freer style suited the prevailing mood. Although his portraits today are not credited with conveying the same degree of psychological insight as those of Stuart or John Singleton Copley a generation earlier, Sully’s dreamy women and dashing men appealed to the country’s elite during his own time. He painted some of the most famous figures of his day, including Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Sully’s best-known work is likely the portrait he painted of the young Queen Victoria in 1838, commissioned by the Society of the Sons of Saint George in Philadelphia and completed during Sully’s second trip to England.

Sully supplemented his income through a partnership in a gallery he shared with the frame maker James Earle. He also took on students and wrote an instructional manual entitled Hints to Young Painters, which was not published until after his death. He was regarded with great respect and affection by the artistic community in Philadelphia, and for many years he was active on the board of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Although commissions for portraits fell off as the artist aged, Sully was still painting up to a year before his death at the age of eighty-nine. He completed more than two thousand paintings over his long career; most were portraits, but his oeuvre included some history and genre paintings as well as copies after old masters. Sully died as a figure much beloved and admired in Philadelphia and throughout the country. Although his reputation as a painter declined in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was revived early in the next century with the publication by Edward Biddle and Mantle Fielding of The Life and Works of Thomas Sully (1783–1872) . [1]

Notes:

[1] Biographical data and dates are adapted from Monroe H. Fabian, Mr. Sully, Portrait Painter (Washington, DC: Published for the National Portrait Gallery by the Smithsonian Institution, 1983), and Carrie Rebora Barratt, Queen Victoria and Thomas Sully (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000).