‘Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians: Painting the Athens of America’
By Peter Conn
The American Philosophical Society Press, 216 Pages

Thomas Sully (1783-1872), I am now convinced, created a series of portraits of post-Revolutionary American culture that in the telling of Peter Conn has become the best way to understand the men and women who created the foundations of education, politics, theater, medicine, journalism, commerce, philanthropy, and religion, and who confronted the fraught history of slavery and its opponents.

Mr. Conn has a back story for every portrait, sharpening our awareness of just why Sully chose to depict his subjects in certain lights, positions, gestures, and what might be called the mise en scène of their accomplishments.

Sully did not agree with the common assumption that a portrait could reveal the subject’s character. Human expression and experience were too varied, too contingent, to suppose that a painted likeness could capture the essence of a person.

He preferred to depict what might be called the cerebral nature of his subjects, which his painting could flesh out into a palpably fascinating individual. Here is how Mr. Conn treats the portrait of a renowned physician, anti-slavery activist, and influential author, speaker, and teacher, Benjamin Rush:

“Finely dressed, as he almost always was, Rush is presented in a rather casual pose, his face showing the age and fatigue that marked his last years. Sully provides an elegant account of Rush’s right hand, holding his place in the text he is reading. Rush’s glance is slightly averted from the document. He has paused, spectacles perched on top of his head, reflecting either on the subject of his reading or on any one of the dozens of topics that engaged him.” 

I’m quoting only part of Mr. Conn’s precise and eloquent description that concludes: “Sully has produced an arresting image of a man thinking.”

A man thinking is, in fact, the feature of Sully’s paintings that Mr. Conn often emphasizes, as in his treatment of the last president of the Bank of the United States, Nicholas Biddle, who came into conflict with President Jackson, who hated the business interests that had built up a central bank.

Mr. Conn observes that Sully has presented Biddle as a “Romantic polymath, resting his still abundant curly-haired head on his hand, indifferent to our presence, gazing in meditative mood, alone with his thoughts. This is a man of learning and letters, a writer and thinker, the lover of all things Greek” — in effect portrayed as Byronic. Mr. Conn notes that Sully had painted the poet and the banker at almost the same time. 

A celebrated actress, Fanny Kemble, married for a time to a Southern slaveholder before divorcing him and refusing to perform in the South, is the daring, outspoken woman delineated in Sully’s painting, turning her face to the viewer, “framed by ringlets,” with a gaze that is “steady, appraising, a declaration of her confidence.”

What Mr. Conn’s descriptive analysis of the paintings shows is an artist concerned with not so much accuracy of physical representation — though he often achieved as much — but the dynamism of figures caught in medias res. They do not stand or sit for posterity; they seem alive with their own thoughts. 

Another actress, Charlotte Cushman, who played Hamlet, Cardinal Wolsey, and Romeo, her “signature role,” is shown on Sully’s canvas, Mr. Conn supposes, in tribute to the “transformative power that this remarkable actor displayed every time she stepped on stage.”

I confess I was a little disappointed in Mr. Conn’s handling of this portrait, which I have kept gazing at because Cushman seems to want me to do so. She looks straight ahead, her mouth turned up almost in a “I dare you” smirk. She seems to have a take it or leave it attitude.

But Mr. Conn would object to what he might consider my fanciful reaction, for he has cautioned us about reading too much into photographs and paintings. He is nothing if not circumspect, preferring to align the biographies of Sully’s subjects with the postures they are assuming in his portraits. 

Of Cushman, he notes, photographs “taken not long after Sully did the ‘portrait’ demonstrate that the picture is, deliberately, nothing approaching a likeness.”

So I take leave of Mr. Conn’s book chastened and edified by his elegant, sensitive interpretations that never verge far from the sources that he delivers so efficiently and informatively in his footnotes.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”