(From Sketchbook) 1810 - 1820

Editor: Here we have “(From Sketchbook)” by Thomas Sully, dating from around 1810 to 1820. It’s a collection of figures, rapidly drawn in pencil, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There’s something intimate about this page. I can see how Sully was thinking! What’s your read on it? Curator: It's like peeking into the artist's mind, isn't it? Raw and unfiltered. Sketchbooks are magical. Think of this page as a visual diary. The soft pencil strokes, the unfinished quality—it feels like Sully is capturing fleeting thoughts, quickly blocking out an idea. There’s a definite Romantic sensibility in that embrace of the spontaneous gesture. Are these practice portraits or compositional studies, do you think? Editor: Possibly both? Some seem more developed than others, as though he started with one idea, refined it, then moved to the next. Almost like brainstorming. Curator: Exactly! And each little sketch tells a tiny story. Notice how he’s playing with light and shadow even in these preliminary strokes, or experimenting with different poses and attitudes. It is clear that this sketchbook page showcases experimentation. The intimacy of it almost makes me feel I shouldn’t be looking. I feel the guilt of the voyeur! Editor: That makes sense, seeing this would be as close as we get to seeing his thought processes at the moment he created the sketches! I appreciate that we have art like this to appreciate too. I wouldn’t have considered all the light experiments as an amateur art lover. Thank you. Curator: Absolutely! That sense of immediacy is powerful. The life of the artist is really in those quickly jotted initial images, capturing a mood and essence and raw instinct.