Thomas Sully, a native of Norfolk, Virginia, is the great-great-great grandson of his namesake, the famed Philadelphia portraitist. After attending art school in California in the early 1980s, he found work in New York City as an illustrator for The New Yorker and a costume painter for the American Ballet Theater and The New York City Ballet. In 1996, he relocated to Charleston, South Carolina, the childhood home of his forebear, where he began receiving commissions for oil portraits and painting the Southern landscape. His interest in portrait miniatures began in earnest after seeing the traveling exhibition, "Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures", which included a miniature painted by his ancestor to mourn the death of his mother. After seeking out the materials for this arcane genre and a period of self-training which consisted of painting himself and family members, he began receiving commissions in New Orleans, where his portrait miniatures found a ready market. He spent four years there receiving commissions, as well as showing non-portrait work in galleries. He recently relocated to the mountains of North Carolina where he is receiving portrait commissions and painting landscapes exploring aspects of the Romantic "sublime". He is also undertaking a series of "fancy pictures", borrowing the term his ancestor used for paintings from imagination or fancy depicting religious, mythological or literary subjects.
"Sully is indeed a painter to be watched ... This is clearly a figurative artist of exceptional intelligence, ability and possibility..."
- Frank Martin, "Dashing Landscapes", The Charleston Post & Courier, 1998
"Sully works in established genres, but while he acknowledges an interest in the work of his predecessors, his paintings are not backward looking."
- Michael Haga, The Charleston City Paper, 1998
"Sully manages to revive and re-locate [Caspar David] Friedrich's famous 'wanderer,' that transfixed loner, and directs him to 'close the bodily eye' (in Friedrich's phrase) and to use the 'spiritual' one. He declares the validity of spiritual experience, and he makes you believe in it."
- Terrington Calas, "Summer Notes", The New Orleans Art Review, September/October 2003
"He has been sought after in the Crescent City (and the rest of the South) for his portrait miniatures of families and, occasionally, their pets. He has also undertaken a series of the strangest and most haunting of miniatures, the eye portrait."
- John Biguenet, "The Intimate Art", The Oxford American, Fall 2005
"In New Orleans, Thomas Sully is combining his knack for painting portrait miniatures with a unique support. The artist paints on small, thinly sliced sheets of ivory cut from the tusks of prehistoric woolly mammoths."
- Caroline McCoy, "Mammoth Minis", Garden & Gun, Fall 2007
"I love portrait miniatures for their intimacy. They sustain a current between the dead and the living, the absent and the present, those separated by the vagaries of life and geography, or even the daily routine."
- Thomas Sully, from "the Intimate Art", by John Biguenet, The Oxford American, Fall 2005