Thomas Sully (1783–1872)

THOMAS SULLY (1783–1872)
The Love Letter, 1835
Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in.
Signed and dated (with artist’s monogram, on the back): TS 1835.

The Love Letter is one of Sully’s “fancy pictures,” a category whose importance in Sully’s oeuvre is well described by William Keyse Rudolph’s essay, “Understanding Sully’s Fancy Pictures,” in Thomas Sully: Painted Performance (Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, 2013, pp. 54–85). “Fancy pictures” enabled Sully to experiment with composition and techniques that might not have pleased his portrait commission clients, while allowing him a freedom of choice in subject that allowed him to call on his theatrical background in devising narrative scenes. More than that, the livelihood of a portrait painter is intimately tied to variations in the local economy. Writing of Sully in the years that preceded his trip to England and his commission to paint Queen Victoria, art historian Carrie Rebora Barrett noted:

Portraiture thrives under circumstances of affluence and self-interest, attributes that had defined Philadelphians for decades, until the mid-1830s. For Sully the current state of affairs—few commissions and delinquent payment for those he had—sent him on the road, along with others like him with mouths to feed at home. During the early 1830s, he took to Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Boston, West Point, New York, Providence, and Annapolis, seeking work (Carrie Rebora Barratt, Queen Victoria and Thomas Sully [Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000], p. 19).

This was the financial situation that prevailed when Sully painted The Love Letter. The picture embodies the artist’s masterful skill in portraiture, particularly in the representation of attractive young women, together with his dramatic sense of a crucial moment. The subject, apparently in her bedroom, reads a letter from a suitor while she contemplates an open miniature, presumably of the same young man, lying open next to her on the bed.