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.
