where he was protected by Benjamin West, who seems to have acted as a sort of dry-nurse to several generations of Philadelphia painters. He returned to Philadelphia, and began his famous career as a portrait-painter, in the course of which he also executed numerous historical and imaginative compositions. In 1837 Sully again went to England, commissioned to paint a portrait of Queen Victoria for the St. George's Society, at Philadelphia. He died in 1872, having painted brood after brood, so to speak, of the beauties of that city, and having developed a side of art in this country which is strikingly representative of the English and American literary feeling of the first half of the nineteenth century.

With the return to English customs came a subjection to the influence

of English thought. The romanticism of Scott and Byron influenced Philadelphia almost as much as it did London. Every staid Philadelphia lady imagined herself to be a Haidee, a Rowena, or a Grecian Maid! Scarfs and veils and flowing locks and fluttering draperies made over the erst tightly trussed damsels into Corsairs' consorts and lovelorn Lammermoor brides. It was when the naïve sentimentalism of a generation that loved heartbreaking emotions and stormy passions was at its height that Thomas Sully came forward to embody in his portraits the romantic spirit of American womanhood in the early years of the century.

Born among the surroundings of the stage, nourished on the traditions of the English drama, it was natural that Sully should have been strongly influenced by Shakespeare. In his more ambitious compositions he depicted many of the bright and beautiful heroines of the great poet, and they seem to have been continually present in his mind, lending their personalities to the portraits he painted. A pretty girl of a spiritual cast of feature straightway became to him a Miranda. A sparkling, brilliant beauty reminded

ELIZABETH BORDLEY.

him of Beatrice, and a tender, passionate face was transmuted within his soul to that of the ardent Juliet. Thus many of the Philadelphia beauties painted by

Philadelphia manhood was absorbed in making money and developing great schemes, and gave little thought to Philadelphia womanhood in the way of gallantry.

How often the Philadelphia beauties must have looked back upon the days of their mothers and grandmothers, and wished they had lived in those stirring times when men were soldiers and not money-grubbers and valued kisses more than kegs-of dollars. Philadelphia was dull enough in the thirties, for Fanny Kemble so tells us in those gloomy letters she wrote from her home at Butler Place, in the suburbs of the city. Society, as it existed in England, was unknown here. Mrs. Kemble-Butler's position as an ex-actress and her domestic troubles may have colored her views of Philadelphia society, but her observations as an intellectual, cultivated woman are an unconscious echo of the remarks of the Duke de la Rochefoucault-Liancourt, who was at Philadelphia between 1795 and 1797. He says, "What is justly called society does not exist in the city." Surely a French duke would have been well received and would have had good opportunities for studying the social conditions of the Quaker City. When Paris and London agree in an estimate of Philadelphia, surely it cannot have been wholly incorrect.

In Fanny Kemble, Sully found a sitter after his own heart-a Shakespearean heroine incarnate! He painted six portraits of her; the one she liked best showed her as Beatrice. She did not sit for this, and it was the first of the series. Sully painted it from memory, after seeing Miss Kemble in the part. The young actress heard of the success of the picture and expressed a desire to view it. From that time she became a warm friend of Mr. Sully and of his family. Several portraits of Miss Kemble, in costume, by Sully are preserved in the permanent collection at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. But the best head is that reproduced in these pages, which was included in the historical loan collection. It is unfinished, being scarcely more than laid in with "dead color," which is, however, of a warmth that gives tone and softness to the noble, classic and somewhat severe features of this intel

lectual actress. It is a beautiful head, with an antique cast of form and a modern feeling in its treatment. The bright, young soul irradiates the face. Such a nature as this, might well feel itself dépaysée in a city where stolidity and frivolity alternated.

When Sully painted Mrs. Elizabeth Bordley Gibson, he chose to depict her seated in a vine-clad arbor, in a pensive attitude and wearing ringlets. An India cashmere scarf is thrown over her shoulders, lest the arbor-damp should produce rheumatism; and a quiescent meekness, a non-resistance to the bold advances of earwigs and other creeping things that commonly reside in vineclad arbors, is expressed in every curve of the white-robed frame. A generation which, influenced by ultra-modern France, insists upon simple, neutral backgrounds in portraits, would naturally jeer irreverently at the arbors, landscapes and various rustic objects which formed the accessories of pictured humanity in the days when Thomas Sully made concessions to Philadelphia portrait-painting traditions. Mrs. Gibson's right hand rests upon a book which we may take to be the celebrated Bordley memoirs, which were written by her. It was doubtless the composition of this memorial to her English ancestry and to the manes of her distinguished father, John Beale Bordley, which entitled her to assume that literary cast of countenance, dress and manner.

Mrs. Gibson's mother was the "Widow Mifflin," a prominent figure in old Philadelphia society and the second wife of Mr. Bordley. Gilbert Stuart painted Miss Bordley as a gay, smiling Greuze-like little soul, with powdered hair and skyblue ribbons, quite unlike the limp and lackadaisical creature that Sully makes of her in middle-age. In the first picture she had not reached the point of yearning after fame-of regarding herself as the Clio of Philadelphia and the Muse of America. Early American female literature, which was chiefly amateur, could have found no better exponent in art than the later picture.

One of Sully's very best pictures of the pretty ladies he loved to paint, is that of Katharine Miercken (Mrs. John Myers) who lived till 1874. She was a

very young woman when Sully painted her in a simple dark-red velvet robe, curved close to the figure, and folded about the lithe body as easily as a calyx about a budding flower. The slender arms and the fresh young throat and neck are bare and quite dazzling in their unshadowed whiteness. A frill of wide old Mechlin lace is all the relief offered to the head, as it rises from the dusky richness of the robe. The face, with a few loose dark locks on the brow, has a look at once proud and roguish. The pose is natural and graceful. The picture, as a whole, is a model of elegance, simplicity and completeness; and some of our modern American portrait-painters, might learn valuable lessons of self

restraint from this excellent example of Sully's art.

The era of "Books of Beauty," with steel and mezzotint engravings, with plaintive poems and sentimental tales, had now arrived. American art and American literature were pressed into the service of these red and gold volumes, without which no gentleman's drawing-room centre-table was complete. Sully's romantic portraits were particularly well adapted to reproduction in these pleasing annuals. and original figure of Mrs. Bernard Henry enjoyed the honors of the beautybook, and well it deserved them, for it is an exquisite bit of idealization. Mrs. Henry was Miss Mary Miller Jackson,

His charming

of Chester County, Pennsylvania, one of the three pocket Venuses" written of by Washington Irving. The tiny figure, with its white drapery curved by the action of the air, is seen to be in motion; the warm, blonde head is all grace and expressiveness. The portrait might easily be supposed a poetic conception of the "West Wind." Few painters have created more harmonious effects of line than Sully. His compositions are suave to an unusual degree. They move the spectator like a sweet melody, and one is not surprised, therefore, to learn that the painter's soul from youth to age was steeped in music. There is nothing of the stage in this group of portraits except

its idealizing tendencies. Sully's love for curves makes Mrs. Henry's picture a dream of harmony.

The portrait of Mrs. William Hall (Christiana Gulielma Penn-Gaskell) shows the same fondness for symmetrical combinations of line. Long sloping effects prevail throughout the composition, from the slanting curves of the picturesque hat, with its heavy droop of feathers, and the narrow shoulders, down to the minutest details of the costume. It is probable that the quick eye of the painter seized the long drooping effect of the head and face as the keynote to the scheme of composition.

Mrs. Hall was an artist and musician