English-born Thomas Sully came to America with his parents in 1792, at age nine. He was brought up in Charleston, South Carolina, where his first art teachers were his older brother Lawrence, a miniature painter, and his brother-in-law, Jean Belzons, who was also a miniaturist as well as a drawing teacher and a theatrical scene designer. When Sully was eighteen he decided to pursue a career as a professional portrait artist and moreover to do so in a larger community where he believed there could be greater potential clientele. After working in Norfolk, Richmond, Boston -- where he also studied with Gilbert Stuart -- and New York, in 1808 he established a home and studio in Philadelphia, which at that time was still the young nation's leading art and publishing center. In 1809 he went to London to study with Benjamin West. While there, however, he was far more influenced by England's leading portraitist of the period, Sir Thomas Lawrence, whom he had met. Much of the aristocratic verve, casual elegance, and flowing lines of Lawrence's portraits would thereafter be evident in Sully's work, though suitably adapted for more restrained American tastes. Back in Philadelphia in 1810, he was increasingly successful. After the death of Charles Willson Peale in 1827, Sully was the undisputed foremost portraitist of the city for four and a half decades (he lived to age eighty-nine). Five Presidents -- Washington (posthumously), Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson are among the more than 2,000 portraits he painted.

Sully's half-length portrait of Martha Wade Young from 1835 demonstrates his mastery of what may be called the decorative romantic style of Lawrence. The slightly askance turn of the head, the eyes that not quite meet those of the viewer, the bemused expression, soft lighting and shadows all add to the subject's gracious bearing. The left arm and hand gently bent so as to hold the wrap and ever so lightly touch the smooth feminine torso is not only a piquant gesture but also an element of verticality which, in continuing on into the line of shoulder, neck, and head, adds an air of eminence and gentility. Mrs. Young was the wife of a prominent Mississippian who, according to family records, made the long journey by overland coach from her home to Philadelphia for the expressed purpose of sitting for Sully. It would have been a particularly arduous journey at the time.

Sully also did other subjects, however, including what were called "fancy" (meaning fanciful) pictures in which typically children are depicted in quaint, sentimental, sometimes mildly amusing situations. The fashion originated in Europe and was popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the first half of the nineteenth century. Such a work is the Hunter's Juvenile Ambition. A precocious lad is shown playing the role of an adult; he has climbed into his father's chair, seated himself on a book to increase his stature, put on the elder's tricorn hat and spectacles, and pretends to read a newspaper.

The artist kept an elaborate register of his paintings and he recorded that Juvenile Ambition was derived from a work by his good friend, Charles Bird King. In fact, he noted that it was begun in December 1824, while he was on an extended visit in King's Washington, D.C. home. It is a remarkably faithful copy, although Sully's technique is rather more crisp and his lighting more dramatic.

King's picture (Winterthur Museum, Delaware) has traditionally been called Grandfather's Hobby, though there is no evidence that this was King's original designation. Sully's painting likewise in the past has been known by that same title. Subsequent owners may have taken the liberty of renaming either or both works to suit their own preferences. But more probably the newer identification followed upon the publication of an engraving after the Sully version and an attendant narrative poem titled Grandfather's Hobby in the 1830 issue of The Token, an attractive Christmas gift magazine that was printed annually in Boston during the 1820s and ‘30s. The unidentified rhymer first speaks of a venerable "sage" from whose lips "we love to learn" telling his grandson about an "olden time when all was heroic, bold and new." Then follows a description of the boy's wonder and fascination at the old man's magical tales and finally the vision that more specifically relates to the painting:

How on the morrow will that boy/With swelling thought resign his toy,
Steal the cocked hat, and on his nose/The reverend spectacles impose,
Mount to the vacant chair, and place/The wise gazette before his face,
And there half sly, half serious por/the last night's legend o'eer and o'er,
And deem himself in boyish glory,/Like the old man that told the story!