Sully considered the high point of his life to be the trip he made to London in 1837 to paint a full-length portrait of the young Queen Victoria. The artist’s journal entry of September 18, 1837, records that Edward Carey, a publisher and art collector, suggested that Sully make the trip to England and offered him one hundred dollars in advance for pictures to be painted either in England or on the artist’s return to Philadelphia. Sully’s "Register of Pictures" indicates that he painted The Gypsy Girl for Carey for a price of three hundred dollars, designing it in England before beginning it in Philadelphia on February 24, 1839, and finishing it there on September 9, 1839. In an apparent contradiction Sully’s journal entry for January 25, 1839, indicates that he "began ... England." Sully is best known as a portraitist, but of the more than twenty-six hundred paintings he made, nearly six hundred were genre and thematic paintings, what he called "fancy pictures." Of these, more than two dozen were of peasant children like this gypsy girl, a subject that appealed very much to early Victorian taste and the purchasers of the period’s elaborately illustrated gift books. The Gypsy Girl appeared in the 1842 volume of The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present as an engraved illustration for Charles West Thomson’s poem "The Gipsy’s Chaunt." Sully’s register records other paintings of gypsy Children, some made as early as 1828, and drawings survive. However, the specific inspiration for Sully’s The Gypsy Girl, the "Hints obtained in England," may have been A Gipsy Girl, 1794 (Royal Academy of Arts, London), the diploma picture of Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), which Sully would have had a chance to see in London at the Royal Academy of Arts. Known to his admirers as "the American Lawrence," Sully was a great admirer of the English artists as the dramatic style of his own The Gypsy Girl attests, in its dramatic contrasts, flowing lines and rich, warm color.

The art of the early Federal period did not greatly differ from that of the late colonial era. Portraits dominated the small field of painting. Victories on land and at sea in the War of 1812 brought the fledgling democracy greater confidence and new national pride. By 1829, when Andrew Jackson assumed the presidency, the foundations for an independent culture were securely laid. The philosopher-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed the mood of the country in 1837: “our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.” The following decades would bring a swell of artistic creativity, focused on native themes that extolled the seemingly limitless bounty of the New World.
Portraiture, and to a lesser extent history painting, continued to occupy American artists, but increasing numbers turned to views of the local countryside and its inhabitants. Although the industrial revolution only began in the United States after the War of 1812, the following three decades witnessed economic changes, especially in the north, that significantly affected working conditions, family structure, and even religion. Paintings illustrated American virtues like ingenuity and industry as well as the pleasures of country life. The new taste for genre pictures—scenes of ordinary people involved in everyday activities—seemed ideally suited to the egalitarian attitude of the Jacksonian era.
This period also saw the rise of the country’s first truly national school of landscape painting, ultimately known as the Hudson River school. Its earliest, best-known exponent, Thomas Cole, sometimes painted romantic literary subjects in European settings, but his dramatic depictions of the American wilderness helped spur the popularity of American views. As the country developed, paintings of uninhabited wilderness were replaced by views of farms, towns, and factories, but American artists retained their sense of awe about the land.

• About the Era.
• Rudolph, William Keyse and Carol Eaton Soltis. Thomas Sully: Painted Performance. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2013.
• Phil Freshman. Los Angeles County Museum of Art Report, July 1, 1981-June 30, 1983. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1984.
• Fort, Ilene Susan and Michael Quick.  American Art:  a Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collection.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.