The son of English actors who immigrated to Virginia, Thomas Sully received training from a miniaturist before traveling to New York to paint portraits and venturing to Boston to receive advice from the eminent Gilbert Stuart (see B.72.117 and B.61.55). Travel abroad to study with Benjamin West (see B.67.26 and B.67.25) in London soon followed. After meeting the British portraitist Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), whose elegant and romantic sense of swagger he soon emulated, Sully returned to Philadelphia in 1810 and became its leading artist for more than thirty years.

Over the course of his long career, Sully painted nearly sixty portraits for the extended family of the prominent Biddles of Philadelphia. James Cornell Biddle (1795–1838), the eleventh of twelve children born to Clement and Rebekah Cornell Biddle, was among the last ten Sully painted of the Biddle family. James had died three years before, and so, according to Sully’s register of portraits (Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), the artist used an existing portrait of the sitter by Henry Inman as his guide (see related examples). The portrait was likely commissioned by a member of the Biddle family to commemorate their recently deceased relation.

Sully’s portrait of Biddle is an excellent example of the artist’s ability to flatter his sitters with a sense of relaxed elegance, a quality recognized by the early American art critic Henry Tuckerman, who wrote, “All of his [Sully’s] men, and especially his women, have an air of breeding, of high tone, and a genteel carriage…. One always feels at least in good society among his portraits.” Averting his head from the viewer, exposing his Byron-like windswept hair and long sideburns, Biddle cuts an elegant figure, dressed in a black, double-breasted coat and white stock, sitting in a red-figured upholstered chair, and set against the standard props of portraiture: a swag of drapery, a plain column, a brilliant sky, and, in his lap, a book, in which the sitter marks his place as he pauses from reading. Dramatic lighting from above sweeps across the sitter’s face and animates the brilliant white stock at his neck. The bravura quality of the painting is exceptional for Sully’s late works.

The Inman prototype is lost, but a study for the painting exists, which is virtually identical to the Houston portrait in costume, props, and composition, suggesting Sully possibly copied the Inman portrait.

Related examples: Henry Inman (1801–1846), Portrait of James Cornell Biddle, c. 1831–34, location unknown; Thomas Sully, Study for James Cornell Biddle, 1841, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York.

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.