Thomas Sully

Thomas Sully was one of the most prolific and successful American portrait painters of the first half of the nineteenth century. Born in Lincolnshire, England, Sully was the child of theater and circus performers and emigrated to America with his family at the age of nine. The Sullys settled in Charleston, South Carolina, where Thomas first learned the technique of painting portraits in miniature. In 1799, he followed his elder brother Lawrence (1769–1804), a miniature painter, to Richmond, Virginia, and worked with him until Lawrence's death in 1804. Two years later, Thomas married his widowed sister-in-law, a happy and prolific union.

In 1806, Sully worked in New York, where he found numerous portrait commissions. That year, he also visited Boston to observe America's most important portrait painter, Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828), at work. Soon after, Sully decided to settle in Philadelphia, which would remain his home. However, by 1809 he became aware of his shortcomings in drawing, anatomy, and modeling, all requisite skills for an ambitious figure painter. He visited England for seven months in 1809–10 to seek the advice and guidance of Benjamin West (1738–1820), the dominant figure in Anglo-American history painting (the moralizing portrayal of great events in history, literature, and Scripture). Sully was also deeply impressed by the fluid painting style of English portraitist Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), and he later adopted many of Lawrence's poses for his own portraits.

Sully enjoyed a prosperous career painting members of the American elite of his day. He became an important figure in Philadelphia's active artists' community, but he also traveled to New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere to fulfill commissions. In 1837, he revisited London and there began a large full-length portrait of the young Queen Victoria, a commission from a Philadelphia organization. He also made numerous likenesses of popular actors in character. Sully's bravura brushwork and the easy elegance of his flattering likenesses compensated for the anatomical awkwardness of his figures. After the deaths of Stuart and Philadelphia painter Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), Sully was without a serious rival as the nation's premier portrait painter until his own powers began to decline in the 1850s.

According to Sully's meticulous records, he painted more than two thousand six hundred works in the course of his career. These included several history paintings, but the artist never questioned his dedication to portraiture. While such contemporaries as Samuel F. B. Morse and Washington Allston foundered in their efforts to bring grand-manner history painting to America, Sully built a successful career by acknowledging his compatriots' insatiable appetite for likenesses of themselves.