Conflict, culture and exchange in 18th-century art across the Americas

The Torn Hat, English-American painter Thomas Sully’s 1820 portrait of his nine-year-old son, Thomas Wilcocks Sully, is reproduced from Art in the Americas: Conflict, Culture, and Exchange in the Eighteenth Century, published by MFA Publications on the occasion of America’s 250th. One of 140 color reproductions by artists across the Western hemisphere and made from the 1700s into the 1800s, it is emblematic of a shift in painting style that corresponded with changing definitions of childhood. “Romantic ideas, which emphasized imagination and emotion over the rationality of the Enlightenment period, migrated to the United States from Europe and inspired artists’ attempts to capture the moods and inner lives of their subjects,” Layla Bermeo writes. “As thinkers rejected colonial-era notions of children as incomplete adults and instead viewed young people as innocent and worthy of nurturing, they redefined play as natural and educational. Loosely encircling his head, the boy’s hat is richly suggestive of his own world, filled with physical activity and adventure.… At a time when his portrait sales were declining, raising concerns about how he would continue to make a living, [Thomas] Sully found a fresh artistic approach through his experiences as a father. In the years that followed, his expressive portrayals of children became some of his most highly regarded, and regularly commissioned, works of art.”

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