American Painting and Sculpture

THOMAS SULLY
(American, 1783-1872)

The Walsh Sisters, 1834-35
Oil on canvas
Bequest of Preston Pope Satterwhite 1949.30.305

This group portrait by Thomas Sully depicts the four daughters of Robert Walsh, a successful attorney and diplomat from Philadelphia. According to the artist’s account book, he worked on the portrait for two and a half months, between December 1834 and early March 1835.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Philadelphia was a thriving city—at various times the political, commercial, cultural, and artistic center of America. Thomas Sully settled in Philadelphia in 1810, after briefly studying painting with Gilbert Stuart in Boston and Benjamin West in London. He quickly established himself as an artist there and, following Stuart’s death in 1828, Sully emerged as the most celebrated portrait painter in America. Today his paintings are admired for their fluid brushwork and sensitive, if romantic, portrayals of his subjects. Indeed, Sully urged his students to flatter their sitters in order to ensure a “successful” portrait.