The Hammock Papers: Sully

Showing posts with label Sully. Show all posts

28 June 2026

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Sully, Life Study of The Marquis de Lafayette, 1825

I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I reflect, and out of all of this I try to form an idea into which I put as much common sense as I can. I shall not speak much for fear of saying foolish things; I will risk still less for fear of doing them, for I am not disposed to abuse the confidence which they have deigned to show me. Such is the conduct which until now I have followed and will follow.

Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, from a letter to his father-in-law on December 4, 1776

Research shows that Lafayette and James Madison met on several occasions. As the two traveled together from September to October 1784, Madison wrote to his father about the meeting ...

I fell in with the Marquis & had his company thus far. He presses me much to fall into his plan, and I am not sure that I shall decline it. It will carry me farther than I had proposed, but I shall be rewarded by the pleasure of his company and the further opportunity of gratifying my curiosity.

Kurt points to the fact that both men understood and practiced the fact that the health of the republic depended on the moral and intellectual qualities of the people who sustained it.

To be a bird among these men.

Whither leadership?

19 June 2026

Happy Birthday, Thomas Sully

Sully, Thomas Jefferson, 1824

Thomas Sully was born on this date in 1783.

American Philosophical Society's presentation of A Final Image: The Thomas Sully Portrait of Thomas Jefferson

20 June 2025

Monumental.

Sully, The Passage of the Delaware, 1819

Elliot Bostwick Davis tells the behind-the-scenes story of Sully's creation and delineation of monumental painting and the origin of the “historical portrait"...

19 June 2025

Happy Birthday, Thomas Sully

Sully, The Sully Children, 1824

Thomas Sully was born on this day in 1783.

16 February 2025

Necessary.

Sully, Portrait of Thomas Jefferson, 1821

Steve points to a timely reminder ...

Still one thing more, fellow citizens, a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government; and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

Thomas Jefferson, from his first Inaugural Address

04 January 2025

Happy Birthday, Rush

Sully, Benjamin Rush, 1812

Temperate, sincere, and intelligent inquiry and discussion are only to be dreaded by the advocates of error. The truth need not fear them.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, born on this day in 1746

19 June 2024

Attach.

Sully, The Student, Rosalie Kemble Sully, 1848

We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theaters, concerts, and exhibitions, together with buildings, statues, poems, novels. But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind — from cradlesong, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special importance.

Leo Tolstoy, from What Is Art?

Happy Birthday, Sully

Sully, Self-Portrait, 66 Years-Old, 1850

Thomas Sully was born on this day in 1783.

19 June 2023

Happy Birthday, Sully

Sully, Passage of the Delaware, 1819

Thomas Sully was born on this day in 1783.

Elliot Bostwick Davis (no hyphen) describes the painting's context and creation ...

13 April 2023

Happy Birthday, Jefferson

Sully, Thomas Jefferson, 1821

I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised, for the preservation of freedom and happiness. If any body thinks that kings, nobles, or priests are good conservators of the public happiness, send them here. It is the best school in the universe to cure them of that folly. They will see here with their own eyes that these descriptions of men are an abandoned confederacy against the happiness of the mass of people. The omnipotence of their effect cannot be better proved than in this country particularly, where notwithstanding the finest soil upon earth, the finest climate under heaven, and a people of the most benevolent, the most gay, and amiable character of which the human form is susceptible, where such a people I say, surrounded by so many blessings from nature, are yet loaded with misery by kings, nobles and priests, and by them alone. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils [tyranny, oppression, etc.] and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.

Thomas Jefferson, born on this day in 1743, from a letter to George Wythe, 13 August 1786

13 April 2022

Happy Birthday, Jefferson

Sully, Thomas Jefferson, 1821

Thomas Jefferson was born on this day in 1743.

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.

Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to Jean Nicholas Demeunier, January 24, 1786

19 June 2021

Happy Birthday, Sully

Sully, Rembrandt Peale, 1859

Thomas Sully, was born on this day in 1783.

13 April 2021

Happy Birthday, Jefferson

Sully, Thomas Jefferson, 1821

Thomas Jefferson was born on this day in 1743.

I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.

Thomas Jefferson

19 June 2020

Happy Birthday, Sully.

Sully, Self-portrait, 1850

Thomas Sully was born on this date in 1783.

Jim Munday lectures on Sully's George Washington ...

07 June 2020

Attention.

Stuart, Thomas Jefferson, 1805

The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them. I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did any where. Among the latter, under pretence of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Carrington, January 16, 1787

19 June 2019

Happy Birthday, Sully

Unknown, Thomas Sully, 1865

Thomas Sully was born on this date in 1783.

Sully, Life Study of the Marquis de Lafayette, 1824 ...

19 June 2018

Happy birthday, Sully.

Sully, The Student, 1848

Thomas Sully was born on this day in 1783.

19 June 2017

Happy birthday, Sully.

Sully, The Student, 1848

Thomas Sully was born on this day in 1783.

19 June 2016

Happy birthday, Sully.

Sully, Life Study of The Marquis de Lafayette, 1825

Thomas Sully was born on this day in 1783.

19 June 2015

Happy birthday, Sully.

Sully, Thomas Jefferson, 1821

Thomas Sully was born on this date in 1783.

BARRY HINES

"That's why it makes me mad when I take her out and I'll hear somebody say, 'Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk. I could shout at 'em; it's not a pet, Sir, hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me, right. And that's why it's great.Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk.' I could shout at 'em. It's not a pet, Sir. Hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained, that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me right. And that's why it's great." (A Kestrel for a Knave)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

WALT WHITMAN

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."