New Book | Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians

Posted in books by Editor on March 31, 2025

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 Drawing upon wide research, including previously unpublished archival material, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians brings to vivid life the men and women who were making the history of early national Philadelphia.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