By Peter Conn
American Philosophical Society Press, 216 pages, $39.95.
Thomas Sully’s “group portrait” of a city at the apex of its influence.
Review by Dennis Drabelle
Imagine yourself in a fictitious art museum devoted to the paintings of Thomas Sully and taking a guided tour of the Philadelphia Portraits Room led by a knowledgeable docent. That is pretty much the experience to be had from reading this delightful book by Peter Conn, the Vartan Gregorian Professor Emeritus of English and a professor of education.
From among the 2,300-plus paintings made by the English-born, Philadelphia-based Sully (1783–1872) during his 70-year career, Conn has chosen 20 portraits of men and women prominent during an era—roughly the first half of the 19th century—when, as per the book’s subtitle, Philadelphia was considered the Athens of America. The city’s claim to that honorific rested in large part on having the nation’s first university (guess which one), one of its first museums (Charles Willson Peale’s), and its first learned association (the American Philosophical Association). “No other American city offers the same opportunity,” Conn argues: “to study what is in effect an important city’s group portrait, painted over several decades, by the same artist.”
Sully was a versatile portraitist. The subjects of his work chosen by Conn include a distinguished foreigner, the Marquis de Lafayette; a Jew, Rebecca Gratz; two professional actresses, Fanny Kemble and Charlotte Cushman; two Black men, Daniel Bashiel Warner and Edward James Roye, each of whom served as president of Liberia; and several illustrious white men.
Conn is at his charming best in glossing the Lafayette portrait. The marquis’s name minus his title was Gilbert du Motier. He was an only child whose parents both died when he was three; nevertheless, he carried on a family tradition by joining the French army. In 1777, at the age of 20, he heeded a suggestion from Benjamin Franklin, at the time an American diplomat posted to France, by traveling to the colonies. There Lafayette joined George Washington’s staff as an honorary officer. Conn points out that Franklin had a hunch that “the young, high-born enthusiast would be useful in gaining French support for the Revolution.”
Commenting on Sully’s Lafayette portrait made during the nobleman’s triumphant return to a worshipful United States in 1824, Conn notes that the artist “trimmed quite a few of the [Frenchman’s] years and pounds and added some hair.” Our docent also quotes from a contemporary Saturday Evening Post rave about “the galvanic effect [Lafayette had] on Philadelphians: ‘We wrap our bodies in La Fayette coats during the day, and repose between La Fayette blankets at night. … We have La Fayette bread, La Fayette butter, La Fayette beef and La Fayette vegetables. … Even the ladies distinguished their proper from common kisses under the title of La Fayette smooches.’ ”
Among the thespians getting the Sully treatment was George Frederick Cooke, an Englishman whose 1811 appearance on a Philadelphia stage was such a big deal that fans waited outside the theater all night to be sure of getting seats when the box office opened. (The record is silent as to whether any Cooke smooches were exchanged under cover of darkness that night.) Conn calls Sully’s portrait of the star costumed as Richard III “intensely dramatic, psychologically revealing, filled with meaningful detail. … His pose confirms Cooke’s decision never to wear the customary artificial hump most actors employed.” Instead, the actor relied on his posture to evoke the king’s deformity.
The Cooke portrait, Conn notes, “secured [Sully’s] reputation”—his national reputation, that is. According to E. Digby Baltzell W’39 Hon’89 in his study Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, Sully’s “transatlantic reputation was secured when he painted young Queen Victoria’s portrait in 1837.” Baltzell also provides a roll call of Boston eminences painted by Sully, including John Quincy Adams.
Something is missing from Conn’s section on the Unitarian minister William Henry Furness. A powerful orator, especially when inveighing against slavery, Furness fathered two brilliant sons: the Shakespeare scholar, Penn provost, and Penn trustee Horace Howard Furness [“One of Those Prodigious Victorian Polymaths,” July|Aug 2013]; and Frank Furness, architect of the striking Fisher Fine Arts Library building on the Penn campus. Horace is mentioned only as a friend of Fanny Kembles’s, and Frank not at all. Not that Conn neglects the institution at which he taught with distinction. Penn gets a chapter to itself that ends with the rescue from obscurity of John Andrews C1765 G1767, who served as the University’s fourth provost and “was regarded as one of the greatest classical scholars in the country and was reputed to be a successful and popular teacher.”
If, like me, you knew nothing about the man Conn calls “probably the most significant politician in Philadelphia’s history,” have a look at Sully’s portrait of George Mifflin Dallas, whose graduation from Princeton “with highest honors” in 1810 augured well. Dallas went on to become mayor of Philadelphia, a US senator from Pennsylvania, and vice president of the United States (under Polk) but seems to have accomplished very little with the power he wielded.
He was certainly easy on the eye, though, as were Rebecca Gratz and John Vaughn (an early stalwart of the American Philosophical Society). Insets of their portraits grace the dustjacket cover of Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians, complementing a much larger reproduction of a Sully self-portrait. Paintbrush in hand, curly brown hair tousled, eyes intent on you, the viewer, the artist might be debating how many of your years and pounds to trim and how much hair to add.
Dennis Drabelle G ’66 L ’69 is the author, most recently, of The Power of Scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origin of National Parks.
