Thomas Sully
American, 1783-1872

Louise Caroline Françoise de Tousard (Mrs. John Clements Stocker), 1808
oil on canvas
36 × 28 in.

SBMA, Gift of Mrs. Sterling Morton to the Preston Morton Collection
1960.83



Thomas Sully, Portrait of the Artist [self-portrait], 1821, MET Museum

RESEARCH PAPER

Thomas Sully is best known for his portraits of women. As an artist, he recommended flattery as a key ingredient of success. The likeness of Louise de Tousard that hangs in our museum was painted five years after Sully had returned from studies in England with Benjamin West and Sir Thomas Lawrence. The latter’s influence can be seen in many of Sully’s more lush portraits.

This portrait is of a young woman, seated on a yellow upholstered bench, turned three-quarters but with her eyes on the spectator. She has dark brown hair in soft ringlets at the temples. She wears an Empire dress of white and the square-cut low neck of the dress shows a gold ring pinned to the center of the neckline.

Mrs. Stocker, born in Haiti, was the daughter of Colonel Louis Tousard (or Youssard) of New Orleans. Her father commissioned the portrait seven years after her marriage. The subject was twenty-six years old, though she appears younger in the picture.

The provenance record indicates that the portrait was owned by the granddaughter of the sitter, then placed at the Knoedler Galleries in New York. Mrs. Sterling Morton purchased it as a gift for the Preston Morton Collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1960. The work is not signed or dated, and his, in itself, is not unusual for Sully’s work. The painting was relined at an unknown date prior to acquisition by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Letters in the file discuss whether this is the same work as being owned at one time by the Frick Library.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibited this portrait at the Memorial Exhibition of Portraits by Thomas Sully in 1922. The relining and the cleaning (executed after 1922) are significant in that a lace shawl or stole covering the subject’s right arm (as noted by the Frick Art Reference Library) was removed. If one looks closely at this area, it is evident that the arm has been loosely retouched, and that the hand on that side is not finely done. The dress is described as white taffeta, but it lacks much sheen.

To understand the importance of the cleaning, one needs to know that Sully generally proceeded from preliminary drawings to a temporary canvas by the second sitting. He wrote that this canvas had to be of a middle gray tint with a dull surface. After a chalk study that served as a model, another study was primed with a white ground. Sully began the actual portrait using burnt umber thinned with oil as if it were watercolor. At the last sitting he introduced glazing colors and thin layers of asphaltum. So far, so good as far as present-day conservators believe. Sully then advocated rubbing the painted surface with a sliced raw potato, then sponging with water and drying with a chamois. It was only after that step (and drying time) that Sully varnished the work.

The work in its present state is lovely and shows some fine brushwork. The clear eyes gaze directly and calmly at the viewer. This was never intended to be a bravura work-rather a flattering record. The picture is calm, and the sitter is not given the verve that shows in some other Sully work. There is a notable lack of luster to the painting (aside from the gold ring), and this may be due to the cleaning that was undoubtedly done in a way that one of today’s conservators would find wanting.

EARLY LIFE AND FORMATIVE INFLUENCES

Sully was born on June 19, 1783 in Homcastle, Lincolnshire, England to the actors, Matthew and Sarah Sully. In 1792 the parents and their nine children emigrated to the United States where a relative managed two theaters in Charleston, South Carolina and in Richmond, Virginia. Young Thomas was schooled briefly and the Sully children were encouraged to perform acrobatics and to act in productions. After a brief stint as an apprentice to an insurance broker, Sully was allowed to study art in Charleston with his brother-in-law, Jean Belzons, a French miniaturist. In 1799, the teenage Sully had a major falling-out with Belzons and fled to Richmond to live and study with his brother, Lawrence, a painter of miniatures.

Sully painted his first oil portrait the following year. When Lawrence died in 1804, Thomas put off his dream of studying abroad, and undertook the support of his widowed sister-in-law, Sarah Annis Sully and her three girls. Sarah and Thomas married in 1806; together they had six more children.

CAREER

Sully had been living in New York with his new family, but the Embargo Act of 1807 affected artists‘ abilities to get supplies (especially good linen) and hurt the regional economy. Sully usually painted on linen, though there are a few examples of his work done on mahogany. Believing that he could gain more commissions in other cities, Thomas installed his family in a boarding house in Hartford, Connecticut. He then journeyed to Boston to visit Gilbert Smart, the famed portraitist of the Federal period. Stuart liked to teach, and was a charming conversationalist. Sully was enthralled and found the experience to be worth gold. In 1808, after collecting the patient Sarah and their brood, Sully moved the family to Philadelphia, then the largest city in the country. Opening a studio, his journal reflects his hopes of becoming well known and financially successful. In that year he completed sixty-three works. He dreamed of doing some great historical pieces, but portraits paid the rent.

Still aware of the need to study with master painters, Sully arranged to go to England in 1809. Prior to leaving on this trip, Sully became an American citizen. Leaving his family in Philadelphia, he sailed to London with a letter of introduction by Charles Wilson Peale to Benjamin West and Sir Thomas Lawrence. Sully worked diligently, making copies of well-known pieces and doing anatomical drawings. He lived frugally, and subsisted on a diet of potatoes, milk, and bread and butter - thus stretching out $400 dollars over a period of nine months. On return home his work immediately showed a change - his brushwork was free and the effect was bold. While away he had not known of the death of his infant son, Thomas.

Sully was an active participant in the cultural life of his city. He was a member of the Franklin Institute and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, serving on the Academy’s board of directors for many years. A charter member of the Musical Fund Society, he would trade portraits for music lessons for his children. And this outgoing son of actors was an avid supporter of the theater.

Sully painted his wife many times, and a full-length work that he executed in 1848 shows her as a wistful and charming woman. This work is both a genre painting and a portrait as it shows Sarah sitting at ease with her pet dog, Ponto (Fabian, 1983). Of special interest are the notes that he made in regards to preparing the canvas with a ground of white lead and skimmed milk to a consistency of paste, then smoothing it out with pumice before proceeding to paint. Sully was sixty-five when he made this beguiling and excellent work.

In his lifetime he produced well over 2600 works. Of the artist’s twenty or so self-portraits, the finest adorns the cover of the National Portrait Gallery’s book published for an exhibition in 1983. He was the portraitist chosen by many famous actors, as well as by such historical figures as Lafayette, Andrew Jackson, and John Quincy Adams. His portraits of women were especially fine. Sully painted the young Queen Victoria in 1838—now in the Wallace Collection in London. Sully’s image of the eighteen-year-old Victoria took remarkable license with state portraiture by portraying her as a beautiful young woman with an inherent sensuality. He depicted her neck and shoulders in a lush, painterly manner that characterizes his best work. While famous for his idealized portraits, many of the most intimate and engaging examples of his work were pictures of his wife and children.

Although the artist continued to paint, fashions changed, and he had decreasing requests for commissions after 1855, and the wolf was near the door. Aware of his situation and in recognition of his contributions to the arts, in 1867 the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts awarded him an annual stipend of $1000 (The Sully Fund) from that date until his death. In the same year, the city of Philadelphia postponed widening of the street near the Sully residence in deference to his reputation and elderly couples’ need to be undisturbed in their old age. Sarah passed away that year.

Thomas Sully died at home in Philadelphia on November 5, 1872. He had completed his last portrait the previous year. The front-page obituary in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin noted the delicacy and refinement of his work, his ability to fascinate, and his long and serene life.

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Beatrice P. Cook, 2003

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barrat, Carrie Rebora, Queen Victoria and Thomas Sully, Princeton University Press, 2000. America Online, 25 January 2003

Barrett, Carrie Rebora, Thomas Sully in the Metropolitan, exhibit organized by Carrie Rebora Barrett, associate curator of the American Paintings and Sculpture, 2000. America Online, 24 January 2003

Fabian, Monroe H., Mr. Sully, Portrait Painter: The Works of Thomas Sully, Published for the National Portrait Gallery. Smithsonian Press, Washington, 1983

Gertz, William H., Thomas Sully, “Mother and Child”, 1827., America Online, 25 January 2003

Goddard, Donald, American Painting, Beaux Arts Editions, Harkavy Publishing Service, New York, 1990
Golberg. Martha, Textural Panels in 19th Century American Painting, Journal for the American Institute for Conservation, JAIC 1993, Vol. 32, Number 1, Article 4 (pp33-42)

Historical Boys’ Clothing, “Thomas Sully (English/American 1783-1872)" America Online, 24 January 2003

Leavitt, Thomas, American Portraits in California Collection. Santa Barbara Museum of Art Exhibition Catalog, April 6-May 8, 1966, No. 26

Swain, Phoebe P., Letter to The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, dated August 17,2000. Provenance file 1960.83

“Thomas Sully”, “Children at Their Morning Devotions,” America Online, 25 January 2003

"Thomas Sully”, America Online, 24 January 2003

“Thomas Sully”, “Early American Paintings”, America Online, 26 January 2003

“Thomas Sully”, Wallace Collection, Hertford House, London, American Online 25 January 2003

“Queen Victoria and Thomas Sully: An American Painter at Buckingham Palace”, 22 January 2001 to 29 April 2001, America Online, 24 January 2003

“Queen Victoria and Thomas Sully,” special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 19, 2000 to January 7, 2001, America Online, 24 January 2003

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Thomas Sully was the dominant American portraitist throughout the first half of the 19th century. Born in England, he immigrated with his parents to Charleston, South Carolina when he was nine years old. He apprenticed with several prominent artists, including Gilbert Stuart. The “Englishness” of his approach, known for its suave brushwork and elegant simplicity, derived from his study abroad with the celebrated British artist Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1809-1810.

This portrait may have been commissioned by the sitter’s father, Anne-Louis de Tousard (1749-1817), as a visual reminder of the daughter he had given in marriage to the Philadelphia based merchant John Clement Stocker in 1808. Tousard, who fought in the American War of Independence under Lafayette, was a decorated General by the time he was sent to New Orleans as an emissary of the French government in 1805. We know from the artist’s records that the Stockers sat for him between May 5th and July 5th of that year. It seems likely that both portraits went to Tousard, as they were evidently conceived as a pendant pair. The portrait of John Stocker, now preserved in the Newark Museum, presents the banker in a casual pose of self-possession, attired as a fashionable dandy with high collar and long sideburns. He turns slightly to his left, as if responsive to his wife’s position turned slightly to her right. Europeanate styling is self-consciously proclaimed by Caroline’s Empire waisted shift and the ringlets cascading loosely to either side of her face, as well as the silk damask-covered chaise longue on which she sits. This attractive pair of portraits would have been a happy way of reminding Tousard of his daughter’s prosperous union, perhaps compensating for her distance from him in time and space.

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