Thomas Sully

(b Horncastle, Lincs, 19 June 1783; d Philadelphia, PA, 5 Nov 1872). American painter of English birth. Sully went to America in 1792 with his family, who were theatre and circus performers. He made at least one appearance on stage as an acrobat in 1794 and was then apprenticed with an insurance broker, after which he was placed with his brother-in-law, Jean Belzons, a miniature painter. After an argument with Belzons, Sully fled and in September 1799 joined his older brother Lawrence (1769-1804), also a miniature painter, in Richmond, VA. In 1801 the Sully family moved to Norfolk, VA, where Thomas painted his first miniature, a likeness of his brother Chester. In January 1803 Lawrence and his family returned to Richmond. Thomas remained in Norfolk for another six months but in July 1803 returned to Richmond, where he opened his own studio.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Portrait artist Thomas Sully (1783-1872) reflected the manners and demeanor of great people of his day. A naturalized American citizen, he preserved for posterity the nation's politicians, military heroes, inventors, actors, and aristocrats as well as European nobles and the queen of England. In the decades preceding the invention of photography, his prolific output of portraits and historic scenes became a storehouse of details from the past.

Born in Horncastle in Lincolnshire, England, on June 8 (some sources say June 19), 1783, to actors Sarah Chester and Matthew Sully, Thomas Sully emigrated to America with his parents and eight siblings at age nine and lived in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1795, his father arranged for his training for a career in business at an insurance office. The broker urged Sully's father to allow the boy to pursue art, his first love. He received coaching from school friend Charles Fraser, who became Charleston's most famous miniaturist, and from an elder brother, Lawrence Sully, who also painted miniatures.

Beginnings of Career

Sully quickly ended formal lessons with his first art teacher, his brother-in-law, Monsieur Belzons, and settled in Richmond, and then in Norfolk, Virginia, to live with his brother Lawrence's family and to study his studio work. According to Sully's logbook, which he maintained throughout a 75-year career, he painted his first miniature on May 10, 1801. After mastering the basics, he began working in oils on large canvases the next year.

After Lawrence's death in 1803, Thomas Sully married his widow, Sarah Annis Sully. With earnings from a growing list of clients, he supported her three children plus nine of their own. Content with a large, energetic family, he settled in New York and advanced his career by painting city notables. After six-and-a-half years, according to his precise calculations, he had produced 70 portraits and earned $3,203.

Advice from the Masters

Business slowed during an economic recession resulting from a trade embargo, forcing Sully to lower his rates to $30 per portrait. An encounter with painter Gilbert Stuart, a fashionable artist famed for his three portraits of George Washington, buoyed Sully's hopes and provided sensible advice. Relocated to Philadelphia, he found the city that suited him for life. To improve his methods, he studied briefly with Stuart and in June 1809 traveled to England to observe art at major museums. He repaid the friends who had advanced him cash for the journey with copies of great art by European masters.

Experiences in England focused Sully's attention on a need for improvement in modeling the human form. Following a study of osteology and anatomy, he advanced to historical pieces. To ready him for the shift, he observed the era's foremost artists, including Benjamin West, narrative painter for King George III. Europe's artistic giant of his day, Sir Thomas Lawrence, taught Sully how to produce flowing, glossy brush strokes for the elegant, romantic poses that earned him the nickname "the Lawrence of America." Lawrence introduced Sully to the family of Fanny Kemble, who was then a year old. In adulthood, the famed Shakespearean actress became one of his favorite subjects. She posed for him 13 times.

Achieved His Best Work

Returning to Philadelphia in 1810, Sully began painting narrative scenes, including one based on a play by Friedrich Schiller and another drawn from William Shakespeare's Richard III. He joined his peers in the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, which was founded in 1805. As his prospects rose, he painted perhaps his most famous historical narrative, the massive Washington Crossing the Delaware (1819). The North Carolina legislature, which had commissioned the scene, rejected it because it was oversized. Sully managed to sell it to a frame maker at the cut-rate price of $500.

His family well provided for, Sully relaxed into a steady rhythm of painting famous subjects, including the Marquis de Lafayette. At the accession of the 18-year-old Queen Victoria in 1837, Sully returned to England to execute his masterwork, a full-length painting of her commissioned by Philadelphia's Society of the Sons of Saint George. On this journey, he depended on his daughter Blanche for companionship and assistance. At Buckingham Palace, he posed her in royal robe and crown to take the queen's place after he completed the bust. The task was tedious and fraught with palace protocol, but the effort immortalized Sully's work and influenced three generations of painters and coin sculptors.

Back in Philadelphia in 1838, Sully received the accolades due a master artist. Into advanced age he added to his logbook, which numbered his life's work at 2,631 paintings and miniatures. A year after his death on November 5, 1872, in Philadelphia, his heirs published posthumously Hints to Young Painters and the Process of Portrait-Painting as Practiced by the Late Thomas Sully (1873). Its explanation of artistic works from the colonial and federal periods retained for history the inside information on color selection, lighting, and technique. His likenesses of 500 historic figures, including Daniel Boone, Benjamin Franklin, and U.S. presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson, are national treasures. In 2000, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City presented a retrospective of his drawings and canvases.

Books

Almanac of Famous People, Gale Research, 1998.

Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia, 1987.

Chilvers, Ian, editor, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art &Artists, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Columbia Encyclopedia, 2000.

Dictionary of American Biography Base Set, American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936.

Merriam-Webster's Biographical Dictionary, 1995.

Murray, Linda and Peter Murray, A Dictionary of Art & Artists, Penguin, 1976.

Periodicals

Magazine Antiques, July 1983; September 2000.

New York Times, October 27, 2000.

Time International, September 25, 2000.

Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, March 28, 1999.

Washington Times, January 28, 2001.

Online

Biography Resource Center,http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC.

This article is about the painter. For the architect, see Thomas Sully (architect).

Thomas Sully
Thomas Sully in 1869
Born	June 19, 1783 (1783-06-19) Horncastle, Lincolnshire, England
Died	November 5, 1872 (1872-11-06) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Occupation	Painter

Thomas Sully (June 19, 1783 – November 5, 1872) was a well-known American (English-born) painter, mostly of portraits.

Contents 1 Life and career 1.1 Early life 1.2 Painting 1.3 Death and legacy 2 Gallery of works 3 References 4 External links

Life and career

Early life

Sully was born in Horncastle, Lincolnshire, England, to the actors Matthew and Sarah Sully. In March 1792 the Sullys and their nine children immigrated to Richmond, Virginia, where Thomas’s uncle managed a theater. The boy attended school in New York City until 1794, when his mother died and he returned to Richmond. By July of that year the family was in Charleston, South Carolina. After a brief apprenticeship to an insurance broker who recognized his artistic talent, at age 12 or thereabouts Sully began painting and studied with his brother-in-law Jean Belzons (active 1794–1812), a French miniaturist, until they had a falling-out in 1799. He then returned to Richmond to learn "miniature & Device painting" from his elder brother Lawrence Sully (1769–1804). After Lawrence Sully's death, Thomas Sully married his sister-in-law, Lawrence's widow, Sarah Annis Sully and not only took on the raising of Lawrence's children but fathered an additional nine children with Sarah himself. Among the children were Alfred Sully, Mary Chester Sully (who married Sully's protégé, the painter John Neagle), Jane Cooper Sully Darley, Blanche, Rosalie Sully, and Thomas Wilcocks Sully. Sully was also one of the founding members of The Musical Fund Society^[1] where he painted the portraits of many of the musicians and composers.

Painting

Plaque on the former home of Thomas Sully in Society Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Sully became a professional painter at age 18 in 1801. He studied face-painting under Gilbert Stuart in Boston for three weeks^[1]. After some time in Virginia with this brother, Sully moved to New York, after which he moved to Philadelphia in 1806, where he resided for the remainder of his life. In 1809 he traveled to London for nine months of study under Benjamin West.

Sully's 1824 portraits of John Quincy Adams, who became President within the year, and then the Marquis de Lafayette appear to have brought him to the forefront of his day. (His Adams portrait may be seen in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.) Many famous Americans of the day had their portraits painted by him. In 1837-1838 he was in London to paint Queen Victoria at the request of Philadelphia's St. George's Society. His daughter Blanche assisted him as the Queen's "stand-in", modeling the Queen's costume when she was not available. One of Sully's portraits of Thomas Jefferson is owned by the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society at the University of Virginia and hangs in that school's Rotunda. Another Jefferson portrait, this one head-to-toe, hangs at West Point, as is his portrait of Alexander Macomb (American general).

Sully's own index indicates that he produced 2631 paintings from 1801, most of which are currently in the United States. His style resembles that of Thomas Lawrence. Though best known as a portrait painter, Sully also made historical pieces and landscapes. An example of the former is the 1819 Passage of the Delaware, now on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Death and legacy

Grave marker for Thomas Sully and his wife Sarah.

Sully died in Philadelphia on November 5, 1872, where he had spent the majority of his long and successful career. He is buried in the Laurel Hill Cemetery. His book Hints to young painters was published after his death.

His son, Alfred Sully, was a brigadier general in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Through Alfred, he is the great-grandfather of the noted Yankton Sioux ethnologist and writer Ella Deloria and the great-great grandfather of Standing Rock Sioux scholar and writer Vine Deloria, Jr. author of Custer Died For Your Sins (1969), an American Indian civil rights manifesto.

Sully was a great-uncle of the New Orleans-based architect, also named Thomas Sully (1855-1939).

Gallery of works

Thomas Sully’s painting Mother and Son	Thomas Sully’s painting Lady with a Harp, a portrait of Eliza Ridgely (1818), was at Hampton Mansion from the 1820s to 1945, when it was sold to the National Gallery of Art[2]	Photo of an engraving of Sully's portrait of Eliza, daughter of Joshua Bates of Boston (USA), and wife to the Belgian statesman Sylvain van de Weyer.	Elizabeth/Elise Wadsworth, wife of Charles Augustus Murray.
Oil on canvas portrait of Elizabeth McEuen Smith by Thomas Sully, 1823, Honolulu Academy of Arts	Portia and Shylock	portrait of Mary Ann Heide Norris

References

1. ^ http://phonoarchive.org/grove/Entries/S21550.htm Phono Archive
2. ^ "Lady with a Harp: Eliza Ridgely, 1818". National Gallery of Art. http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object=32593+0+prov. Retrieved 2008-02-05. 

• Murray, P. & L. (1996). Dictionary of art and artists. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-051300-0.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Thomas Sully

• The Winterthur Library Overview of the archival collection on Thomas Sully.

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