ITP 44: Queen Victoria, by Thomas Sully

Date: 18-02-2001
Owning Institution: Collection of Mrs Arthur A. Houghton, USA. Currently on loan to The Wallace Collection.
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”    
Subject: 19th Century      

In this, the centenary year of Queen Victoria’s death, today’s picture is Thomas Sully’s portrait of her as a young woman, on the threshold of her destiny, ascending the royal throne. The painting was regarded by the young queen and her advisers as the most pleasing of the many likenesses commissioned in the year of her coronation: Lord Lansdowne, President of the Queen’s Council, commented that “all the portraits hitherto painted of her Majesty have been comparatively a failure, except Mr Sully’s who had … caught an expression which was peculiar and very favourable.” Completed in the artist’s home town of Philadelphia, America, following several sittings with the queen in England, the picture was recently placed on temporary loan to the Wallace Collection in London. It has only been exhibited once in this country before, in 1888, the year of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.

Thomas Sully left Philadelphia for London in the autumn of 1837, accompanied by his twenty-one-year-old daughter Blanch. Business was bad back home owing to an American economic recession, and Sully hoped to find some much-needed work abroad. He would also take the opportunity to familiarise himself with the styles of the leading painters in London, and to introduce his young daughter to English manners and society. On the day before his departure, an unexpected commission came his way from the local chapter of the Society of the Sons of Saint George, a benevolent association created to support indigent English emigrants and their families. The gentlemen of the society wanted a full-length portrait of Queen Victoria for their meeting room. The fee was to be $1,000. The artist would see what he could do.

Sully had the advantage of being reasonably well known. He had trained in London as a young man, in the studio of Thomas Lawrence, whose slick and fluent style he had emulated perhaps not perfectly but at least with enough success to earn himself the sobriquet of “the American Lawrence”. The son of travelling actors, he had specialised in theatrical portraiture and had enjoyed a particular succes d’estime with various pictures of the celebrated British emigre actress Fanny Kemble Butler. Owing largely to this connection, and somewhat to his own surprise, the modest Mr Sully found that he was a welcome guest in London high society.

But Queen Victoria kept him waiting; and as the months passed the artist became increasingly restless. The weather was appalling and both he and Blanch suffered constantly from colds and influenza. He kept a journal, a diary of his mounting frustrations. The entry for 24 February 1838 conveys his uneasy state of mind, exacerbated by the living conditions in the rooms he had rented in the West End:

“The rain has been incessant until the present time. The confined space allowed for a house in the streets of London obliges the use of water-closets and as they often get out of order, the inconvenience is great. The water pipes leading to ours have become frozen, and for the present it is abandoned - luckily there is a subterranean place, for the servants, to reach which a lighted candle is required to wind your way through dark and dismal passages… The Queen’s physician has disapproved of her sitting for more portraits at the present time. I wish I were relieved from the uncertainty of her sitting to me! I am quite tired of suspense on the subject.”

Less than a month later, when the disgruntled and sanitationally inconvenienced painter had almost given up hope, Victoria agreed to sit to him. Despite his annoyance, she had not been especially slow in allowing him into her presence. There was simply a very long queue of artists petitioning to paint her in coronation year. As the painter and author C.R.Leslie noted, at the annual Royal Academy exhibition of 1838, “There are Queens of all sorts and sizes, as you may suppose, good, bad and indifferent”.

Sully quickly decided on his own conception, which was to be a daring and dramatic departure from the conventions of state portraiture (rules which he, as an American artist working for American patrons, had the freedom to disregard). He was immediately struck with the vivacity of the eighteen-year-old monarch who, accompanied by her ladies in waiting, laughed and joked and played with a lapdog. She reminded him of his own only slightly older daughter, Blanch, and also of Fanny Kemble Butler, the émigré actress whose portrait he had painted so often and with such success. She had the same feistiness, he thought, even if the physical resemblance between the two was not especially strong. At one point, in fact, the conversation between sitter and artist turned to the subject of Mrs Butler. Victoria remarked acidly that she thought the famous actress much too thin to be genuinely pretty. The queen herself, Sully noted without malice but with almost fatherly amusement, was “short – five feet one and a quarter inch” and distinctly “plump”.

Victoria assumed that Sully, like her other coronation portraitists, would want her to pose for him sitting in the throne. But this American son of itinerant actors, with his instinct for the drama of her situation, positioned her instead at the top of the steps leading to the throne, looking back at him. “Am I in the position you require, Mr Sully?” she asked him, with a mixture of amusement and mild surprise – an expression that seems written on her face in the portrait, too. Before her the great throne awaits, against a dramaticially tenebrous backdrop of regal red, while her crown and sceptre lurk ominously on a table in the shadows to the left.

Victoria was too busy to allow Sully all the sittings he requested, but graciously allowed his daughter into the palace to sit in her place “as a mannequin”. So it was that Blanch Sully became the first and last American citizen ever to wear the British crown. These unusual circumstances can only have intensified the painter’s compassionate and paternal view of the teenage queen, suddenly burdened with an extraordinary responsibility, placed almost overnight at the head of the greatest empire in the world. In his diary he wrote approvingly of her ability “to throw aside constraint and laugh and talk freely like a happy innocent girl, of eighteen - Long may she feel so light of heart!” But his knowledge that such a thing was, of course, impossible is what gives his portrait its poignancy.