Philadelphia’s early national history represented in Thomas Sully’s portraits

Thomas Sully is widely regarded as perhaps the most important portrait painter of the antebellum years. Using those portraits, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians: Painting the Athens of America reconstructs many of the people, institutions, and events that combined to make Philadelphia, from the Revolution until the 1840s, at once the most cosmopolitan and most racially embattled city in America. The book approaches Sully’s portraits as visual documents in the history of Philadelphia in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The faces of the men and women who appear in his portraits are alive with intelligence and personality. His best work has been summed up by Carol Soltis, of the Philadelphia Museum of Art: “luminous color, a dramatic or nuanced quality of light, a rich but refined handling of paint and description of form, tightly integrated compositions that underline a narrative or dramatic moment.”

Gathered under headings that include individuals, institutions, professions, and contemporary events, Sully’s portraits offer points of entry into much that was going on in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Conn explores education, politics, theater, medicine, journalism, commerce, philanthropy, religion, and the fierce debate over slavery. In each case, Sully’s portraits bring to vivid life the men and women who were making the city’s antebellum history.

Drawing upon wide research, including previously unpublished archival material, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians brings to life the men and women who were making the history of early national Philadelphia.

Peter Conn retired from the University of Pennsylvania as Vartan Gregorian Professor of English and Professor of Education and was a member of the graduate groups in the history of art and American civilization. His publications include The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898–1917, Literature in America, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (a “New York Times Notable Book”), and The American 1930s: A Literary History.

Conn wrote and presented a video course and book on “American Best Sellers” for the Teaching Company. He has given talks at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Whitney Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other institutions, on a number of American artists, including Edward Hopper, William Christenberry, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Maxfield Parrish, Charles Sheeler, Winslow Homer, Wharton Esherick, and The Eight.

A John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, Conn has also received several awards for distinguished teaching. He has served as literary consultant on numerous television projects, including the Emmy-winning series, "The American Short Story," adaptations of novels by James Baldwin and Saul Bellow, and a video biography of John Dos Passos.

Since 1993, Conn has served as visiting professor at the University of Nanjing in the People’s Republic of China. In 2011 and again in 2013, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Conn lectured in West China on topics in American studies.