Arthur Joseph Sulley

Arthur Joseph Sulley (1853-1930) was a London-based art dealer best known for selling Dutch Old Master paintings, including the record-setting Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Mill.

Sulley was born in 1854 in Nottingham, England to Selina Sulley and Joseph Sulley, a jeweler. He was the second-oldest of five children. He married Louisa A. Gordon in 1880 and settled in Hampstead Village, a London suburb. By the time of his death on 30 October 1930, he lived and worked at 54 Grosvenor St. in the center of London.

Sulley established himself in the art world by working with Thomas McLean on the Haymarket, a street in the City of Westminster, London. He left his partnership there on 30 June 1892. He went on to become a principal for Lawrie & Co., a major London art dealership with a base in Glasgow. He also worked extensively with P. & D. [Colnaghi] & Co. and Thomas Agnew & Sons (both based out of London), M. Knoedler & Co. in New York, and Galerie Sedelmeyer of Paris. In 1895 and 1896, he traveled in the United States. At the time, most of the American purchases of Dutch Old Master paintings went through Lawrie & Co. and Sulley found a role to play in this market. He worked with several American collectors and industrialists, including Alexander Byers, Peter Arrell Brown Widener, and Henry Clay Frick.

On behalf of Knoedler & Co., Sulley first reached out to Frick in the summer of 1897, about an Anthony Van Dyck painting of a “Grimaldi child.” The exact painting is unclear. Van Dyck painted only one pair of children’s portraits—of Elena Grimaldi’s children, Filippo and Maddalena (also known as “Clelia”)—but Knoedler & Co. did not acquire its stake in the two works until 1907 and sold them to Peter Widener in 1908.

On 30 October 1899 Knoedler & Co. contacted Sulley about selling a Frans Hals piece to Frick. And two years later, Sulley helped to sell Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at her Music, which Knoedler & Co. and Lawrie & Co. co-owned, to Frick for $26,000. In 1902, Knoedler & Co. agent Charles Carstairs sold a Meindert Hobbema painting (jointly owned by Lawrie & Co.) to Frick. Carstairs wrote about the sale to Sulley: “[I]t is also a good thing to get Mr. Frick in the habit of buying these expensive things.” .”

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