Thomas Sully

In the winter of 1837, a Philadelphia painter crossed the Atlantic to paint a teenager who had just become queen. Thomas Sully had been sent by a Philadelphia society to make a portrait of the young Victoria, and in 1838 he produced the first state portrait of her reign, showing her turning on the stairs of the House of Lords, her robe spilling behind her. When the queen could not sit, Sully's daughter Blanche stood in wearing the royal costume so he could keep working.

Sully was English by birth, brought to America as a boy, and he became the busiest portraitist of his generation in Philadelphia. Over a long career he painted something close to 2,000 portraits, giving his sitters a soft, flattering glow that owed a good deal to the fashionable London painters he admired.

He also tried his hand at history painting. His Passage of the Delaware, showing George Washington before the crossing of 1776, was finished in 1819, more than 30 years before Emanuel Leutze's far more famous version of the same scene. Sully went on working almost to the end, dying in Philadelphia in 1872.