Philadelphia’s early national history represented in Thomas Sully’s portraits

Thomas Sully is widely regarded as perhaps the most important portrait painter of the antebellum years. Using those portraits, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians: Painting the Athens of America reconstructs many of the people, institutions, and events that combined to make Philadelphia, from the Revolution until the 1840s, at once the most cosmopolitan and most racially embattled city in America. The book approaches Sully’s portraits as visual documents in the history of Philadelphia in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The faces of the men and women who appear in his portraits are alive with intelligence and personality. His best work has been summed up by Carol Soltis, of the Philadelphia Museum of Art: “luminous color, a dramatic or nuanced quality of light, a rich but refined handling of paint and description of form, tightly integrated compositions that underline a narrative or dramatic moment.”

Gathered under headings that include individuals, institutions, professions, and contemporary events, Sully’s portraits offer points of entry into much that was going on in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Conn explores education, politics, theater, medicine, journalism, commerce, philanthropy, religion, and the fierce debate over slavery. In each case, Sully’s portraits bring to vivid life the men and women who were making the city’s antebellum history.

Drawing upon wide research, including previously unpublished archival material, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians brings to life the men and women who were making the history of early national Philadelphia.