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3 9.5 (2)

Mother and Son  1840

by Thomas Sully

This grand, allegorically rich portrait of Sully's daughter Jane Cooper Sully Darley (1807-1877) and her son Francis Thomas Sully Darley (d.1914) has provoked many interpretations, the most ambitious of which equates mother and son with the mythological figure of Penelope, the ideal wife of Odysseus, and Telemachus, her perfect son. Sully filled the composition with attrib...
Credit: 
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art