With tousled hair, head turned sharply to the side, and hand resting on a sculptural fragment drawn from the antique, Fielding Lucas, Jr., (1781 – 1854) could be mistaken for a dramatically lit leading character in a romantic stage play. However, when Thomas Sully painted him in Philadelphia, Lucas was on the cusp of a prosperous commercial career. Soon after the portrait’s completion, the artistically inclined young man became a partner in Conrad, Lucas, and Company, a stationery and bookselling firm in Baltimore. Assuming control of the company in 1810, he added publishing to its functions, producing artistically distinguished books and maps. Lucas also exercised his artistic interests by supporting construction of the Washington Monument, begun in Mount Vernon Square in 1815. He is numbered among the founders of the Maryland Historical Society as well as the Maryland Institute College of Art. Fielding’s son George became an important international collector and art advisor. Much of George Lucas’ collection now resides in the BMA. Sully posed Lucas in the manner of 18th-century portraits of English aristocrats enjoying educational travels on the continent. The antique head is copied from a plaster cast of the Laocoön, a famed Greek marble sculpture in the Vatican Museum, Rome. Sully encountered its plaster copy at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which was the leading school for artistic instruction in America at the time.