John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)

This large, full-length portrait of the sixth president of the United States is the joint work of two major American artists. Gilbert Stuart painted Adams’s face, but died before he could complete the body. After his death, a group of prominent Bostonians prevailed on Thomas Sully, a young Philadelphia painter, to finish the picture. Sully traveled to Boston for this purpose in the summer of 1829. With the exception of Adams’s face, the entire portrait is the work of Sully. The portrait was commissioned by Adams’s cousin, Ward Nicholas Boylston. A graduate and a supporter of Harvard, Boylston planned to bequeath the work to his alma mater, together with John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Adams’s father (John Adams, 1783). At Boylston’s request, Sully designed the portrait as a pendant to Copley’s, which is exhibited here to the right. The works have the same scale, share a composition and neoclassical style, and have similar background landscapes. They have been displayed together at locations across the Harvard campus since they arrived in 1828.