Alfred Sully
1821–1879 · American army officer and amateur painter
Alfred Sully (Philadelphia, 1820 or 1821 – 1879) was an American army officer who fought in the Mexican-American War, the Indian Wars and the Civil War. The son of the portrait painter Thomas Sully, he trained as an amateur painter, although his reputation rests mainly on his military career. His interest in drawing led him to make professional sketches while still a teenager, including studies of the Walnut Street Prison, before he entered West Point in 1837.
During the 1840s and 1850s he served in Florida, at the siege of Veracruz and in California, where he was chief quartermaster in Monterey from 1849 to 1853. There he produced oil and watercolor paintings of social life in the town. In the Civil War he commanded troops in Missouri and took part in the Peninsula campaign and at Antietam. He was removed from command by John Gibbon after failing to suppress a mutiny of the 34th New York at Chancellorsville, but a court of inquiry cleared him in 1863.
Sent to Dakota Territory, he led the punitive expeditions known as Sully's Expedition against the Sioux, including the battles of Whitestone Hill, Killdeer Mountain and the Badlands in 1864. After the war he returned to the regular army and continued fighting in the Indian Wars. His lasting interest for painting lies in his scenes of Monterey, a rare record of mid-nineteenth-century California.