In his depiction of the portrait of a young woman, Poe’s narrator alludes to the painter Thomas Sully, as well as a number of concepts drawn from the history of art. As the narrator looks at the painting, he observes that:
The portrait, I have already said, was that of a young girl. It was a mere head and shoulders, done in what is technically termed a vignette manner; much in the style of the favorite heads of Sully. The arms, the bosom, and even the ends of the radiant hair melted imperceptibly into the vague yet deep shadow which formed the background of the whole. The frame was oval, richly gilded and filigreed in Moresque. As a thing of art nothing could be more admirable than the painting itself.
The painting, the narrator notes, is not a full body portrait, but rather, a bust depicting her “head and shoulders,” which reminds the narrator of the style of “Sully.” By Sully, the narrator references Thomas Sully, a notable painter who was born in Great Britain but found prominence in the United States in the early decades of the 19th century. Sully was well known for his portraits, which often depicted the upper body of his subjects.
In addition, the narrator alludes to other important concepts and styles from art history. By describing the painting as being presented in a “vignette manner,” Poe means that the portrait is surrounded by an elaborate frame. Further, his description of the frame as “Moresque” suggests that it features an intricate pattern in gold, similar to the artistic style associated with the Moors, or in other words, various Islamic cultural groups of the medieval Mediterranean. The narrator’s various allusions both describe the portrait and also testify to his keen understanding of art.
In the opening lines of the story, Poe alludes to Ann Radcliffe, a writer broadly considered a pioneer in the genre of gothic fiction. After breaking into the abandoned chateau, the unnamed narrator describes his distinctly Gothic surroundings:
The château into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Apennines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe.
By “Mrs. Radcliffe,” the narrator alludes to the writer Ann Radcliffe, who rose to prominence in the 1790s for her Gothic fiction. Her Gothic novels made her one of the most popular writers of her day, and in turn, she helped to lend respectability to the Gothic genre, or “romances” as they were then known. In alluding to Radcliffe, Poe acknowledges a major influence on his own writing. Poe was a member of a later generation of Gothic writers who were active several decades after Radcliffe’s career. The narrator's reference to Radcliffe acknowledges that the setting of the story, an abandoned mansion in a ruined state, is conventional for Gothic fiction.
