Thomas Sully III, a native of Norfolk, Virginia, is the great-great-great grandson and namesake of the famed Philadelphia portraitist. After studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and California Institute of the Arts, he found work in New York City as an illustrator for The New Yorker and as a costume painter for a company whose clients included the American Ballet Theater and The New York City Ballet. His interest in portrait miniatures began after seeing the travelling exhibition, “Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures,” which included a work painted by his ancestor to mourn the death of his mother. After seeking out the materials for this arcane genre, he began receiving commissions in New Orleans where his portrait miniatures, including Lover’s Eyes, found a ready market. He also continued to paint and exhibit large figurative paintings and landscapes. Currently working out of Nashville, Tennessee, he paints figures in the landscape including series of Lotus Eaters, Naiads, Nereids, and other ne’er do wells.

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Art, for me, is a great mediator, a way of achieving equilibrium with reality. The pictorial rhetoric that I find suitable to the subject often becomes the subject itself. And though my themes are sometimes inspired by literary sources, I’m interested in color as a language older than stories and words, une langue pre-alphabetise’.