Book: Hints To Young Painters, And The Process of Portrait-Painting

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Author: Thomas Sully
Location: Google books

• Variously known as "The American Sir Thomas Lawrence," and "The American Patriarch of Painting," the English-born artist, Thomas Sully, was one of America's greatest portrait painters. Of the 2631 paintings Sully created in his seventy-year career, more than 2000 were portraits, including pictures of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, the Marquis de Lafayette, John Quincy Adams, James K. Polk, and the then newly-crowned Queen Victoria (1837). Of these works, the vast majority are in collections in the United States.
• In 1819, Sully began taking on students, teaching them to paint free of charge. Due to health and time restrictions, he was eventually forced to limit the number of students to those who were already skilled at drawing and who could afford an annual tuition of $500. In the 1850s, however, as Sully's domination of the portraiture field began to wane, his thoughts once again returned to teaching on a larger scale. During this time, he began an art instruction book, but by the time of his death, twenty years later, the manuscript had yet to be delivered to any publisher.
• This is that book, which Sully revised in 1871, and which was finally published posthumously in 1873. Though trained as a miniaturist, Sully briefly studied with Benjamin West, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and Gilbert Stuart, whom Sully credited with having the greatest impact upon his career; it is likely that the color palette Sully recommends in the book is the same he learned from Stuart in the three weeks he studied with the man.