New Book | Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians
Coming in April, from Penn Press:
Peter Conn, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians: Painting the Athens of America (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society Press, 2025), 216 pages, ISBN: 978-1606180495, $40. Also available as an ebook.
Philadelphia’s early national history represented in Thomas Sully’s portraits
Thomas Sully (1783–1872) 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. Gathered here 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. Peter Conn explores education, politics, theater, medicine, journalism, commerce, philanthropy, religion, and the fierce debate over slavery. Drawing upon wide research, including previously unpublished archival material, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians brings to vivid life the men and women who were making the history of early national Philadelphia.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 and Literature in America. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book. The American 1930s: A Literary History was published in 2009. Conn wrote and presented a video course 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.
c o n t e n t s
1 Introduction
2 A Brief Biography
3 Pennsylvania Hospital
• Samuel Coates
• Benjamin Rush
4 The Second Bank of the United States
• Nicholas Biddle
5 The Theater
• George Frederick Cooke
• Fanny Kemble
• Charlotte Cushman
6 The Library Company of Philadelphia
• Zachariah Poulson
7 The Jews of Philadelphia
• Rebecca Gratz
8 The American Philosophical Society
• John Vaughan
• Peter Stephen Du Ponceau
9 Lafayette Returns to Philadelphia
10 The Historical Society of Pennsylvania
• William Rawle
11 Natural History
• William Wagner
• William Maclure
12 The University of Pennsylvania
• John Andrews
13 The Debate over Slavery
• William Henry Furness
• Benjamin Coates
• Daniel Bashiel Warner and Edward Roye
14 Epilogue: Thomas Sully and His Critics
• Jonathan Williams
• George Mifflin Dallas
Bibliography
Index
Eli Wilner & Co. Makes an 18th-C. Pier Mirror for Drayton Hall
Late-18th-century-style pier mirror; walnut, basswood, and parcel-gilt; created in 2024–25 by Eli Wilner & Company for Drayton Hall Preservation Trust, Drayton Hall Museum Collection. The mirror was unveiled at the 2025 Charleston Show (March 21–23).
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As noted at Art Daily:
With assistance from their partial funding program for museums, Eli Wilner & Company recently completed the creation of a late 18th-century style pier mirror for Drayton Hall Preservation Trust. March has been another successful month for Eli Wilner & Company’s frame funding initiative, with $125,000 in partial grants having been distributed to date. Nearly $50,000 in funding is still available. Exciting new projects are being submitted on a daily basis by museums across the country. Remaining funds will be committed to new projects by 30 April 2025 and can be used for frame restoration, historic frame replication, or mirror replication projects. Interested institutions can apply by emailing the details of their reframing or frame restoration needs to info@eliwilner.com. No project is too large.
Patricia Lowe Smith, Drayton Hall’s Director of Preservation, initially contacted Wilner in the spring of 2024 about the potential project after they had discovered telltale marks on the original moldings surrounding the drawing room windows, indicating a lost pier mirror. Since no other documentation was found to provide the specifications or origin of the object, Wilner presented Drayton’s team with period-appropriate replacement options based on historical photographs and hand-tracings of Drayton’s walls.
The selected digital mockup was then printed to scale for Wilner’s master carpenters to begin construction of the walnut substrate and basswood blocks for the multiple hand carved elements. To get a better understanding of the depth proportions and construction methods that were not apparent in two-dimensional photographic images, they visited nearby institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New-York Historical Society, and the Museum of the City of New York to examine similar objects.
After several months of woodworking and carving, the basswood portions of the frame were prepared with layers of finely sanded gesso and bole (a liquid clay) and watergilded. These delicate elements were then burnished and patinated to a period appropriate character. Meanwhile, the walnut substrate sections were stained. Finally in February 2025, following an in-person studio visit with members from Drayton Hall’s preservation team, all portions of the frame were fully secured into position, and the glass and hanging hardware was installed.
Eli Wilner & Company has completed over 15,000 framing projects for private collectors, museums, and institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and The White House. Wilner was honored by the Historic Charleston Foundation with the Samuel Gaillard Stoney Conservation Craftsmanship Award, for their work in historic picture frame conservation. In 2024, Eli Wilner was presented with an Iris Award for Outstanding Dealer of the Year by the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.
New Book | Rebellion 1776
I’m a big fan of Anderson’s Seeds of America Trilogy (Chains, Forge, and Ashes) and Fever, 1793. Her latest is set to be published April 1, from Simon and Schuster. –CH
Laurie Halse Anderson, Rebellion 1776 (New York: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2025), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-1416968269, $19.
From New York Times bestselling author Laurie Halse Anderson comes a “thoroughly researched, emotionally resonant” (Booklist, starred review) historical fiction middle grade adventure about a girl struggling to survive amid a smallpox epidemic, the public’s fear of inoculation, and the seething Revolutionary War.
In the spring of 1776, thirteen-year-old Elsbeth Culpepper wakes to the sound of cannons. It’s the Siege of Boston, the Patriots’ massive drive to push the Loyalists out that turns the city into a chaotic war zone. Elsbeth’s father—her only living relative—has gone missing, leaving her alone and adrift in a broken town while desperately seeking employment to avoid the orphanage. Just when things couldn’t feel worse, the smallpox epidemic sweeps across Boston. Now, Bostonians must fight for their lives against an invisible enemy in addition to the visible one. While a treatment is being frantically fine-tuned, thousands of people rush in from the countryside begging for inoculation. At the same time, others refuse protection, for the treatment is crude at best and at times more dangerous than the disease itself. Elsbeth, who had smallpox as a small child and is now immune, finds work taking care of a large, wealthy family with discord of their own as they await a turn at inoculation, but as the epidemic and the revolution rage on, will she find her father?
Laurie Halse Anderson is a New York Times bestselling author known for tackling tough subjects with humor and sensitivity. She’s twice been a National Book Award finalist, for Chains and Speak; Chains also received the 2009 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction. Laurie was chosen for the 2009 Margaret A. Edwards Award and received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2023, presented to her by the Crown Princess of Sweden.
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