About this work
This painting captures the final, pivotal moment of one of literature's most enduring adventure stories — the departure from the island — rendered in Sully's characteristically intimate, Romantic hand. *Robinson Crusoe and His Man Friday Leave the Island* is an oil on board, measuring approximately 25.4 × 31.6 cm , making it a compact, jewel-like work. The scene depicts the two figures — Crusoe, the shipwrecked English castaway, and Friday, his loyal companion — setting out from the shore that held them for nearly three decades, with the vast open sea ahead. In keeping with Sully's portrait training, the figures are the emotional center: their postures and expressions carry the weight of relief, anticipation, and the strange grief of leaving a place that was, against all odds, home. The palette likely echoes the warm, luminous tones and fluid brushwork that define the series, with the island's vegetation and light-struck water framing the human drama at its heart.
This painting belongs to a remarkable group of ten oil sketches held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, depicting episodes from Daniel Defoe's *Robinson Crusoe* — tracing Crusoe's full 28-year stay on the island, from the shipwreck that landed him there to his eventual departure.
Sully dated the first sketch to 1856, and they served as preparatory studies for ten larger paintings of the same subjects completed in 1858; on the reverse of the first sketch, Sully acknowledged his source as illustrations by English artist Thomas Stothard, published in an 1820 edition of *Robinson Crusoe*. That Sully, then in his early seventies and one of the most celebrated portraitists in America, turned so earnestly to literary narrative is itself telling. In addition to the *Robinson Crusoe* series, Sully painted many other literary subjects — a dimension of his output that has been largely overlooked, though it reveals an imaginative range well beyond his reputation as a portraitist.
Small in scale but expansive in feeling, this work is ideally suited to an intimate setting — a study, a reading room, or a well-curated hallway where it can be encountered up close and on its own terms. It speaks to readers and to anyone drawn to the literature and visual culture of the 19th century, as well as to collectors interested in the quieter, less familiar registers of a major American master. The mood is one of threshold and resolve — a moment of leave-taking charged with everything that came before it — making it a quietly compelling presence on any wall.
