Thomas Sully
Date:
1822
Medium:
Oil on canvas
Size:
Width: 24 1/2″
Height: 29″

Here, Richard Henry Bayard (1796–1868) poses in a fur-collared jacket and with fashionably tousled hair. The fur adorning his coat reflects the centuries-old trading network that linked Indigenous communities across North America to French, British, and Dutch colonizers who exported animal pelts.

Thomas Sully completed this portrait shortly after Bayard’s marriage to Mary Sophia Carroll (1804–1886). Carroll grew up on Homewood, a plantation built upon the ancestral Piscataway and Susquehannock land, where the BMA sits today. Bayard was the first mayor of Wilmington, Delaware, and served two terms in the U.S. Senate representing Delaware.

Bequest of Ellen Howard Bayard BMA 1939.179

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