Mary Trusler

Painted about five years into Mary Trusler's second marriage, her portrait reveals Jeremiah Theus's direct observation of his Charlestonian sitter, her desire for elegant representation, and his own stylistic difficulties. Theus, who had immigrated to South Carolina from Switzerland with his family as a teenager, relied heavily on the use of engravings for his portrait compositions. The placement of the sitter in an oval opening was typical in such prints. The luxurious satin dress Mary Trusler wears was also taken directly from an engraved source, shown by the contrast between its hard-edged, uniformly lit folds and the much more sensitively modeled face of his thirtyish sitter. The elaborate bow on Mary Trusler's lace fichu and the string of pearls around her neck are devices Theus used in many of his portraits to bridge the gap between what was real and what was borrowed from artistic sources-often with his sitters' full compliance.