Francesco Anelli

[3] Anelli's portrait style is distinctive—in its sharp linearity, bright lighting, and highly reflective surfaces—and appears the antithesis of the dominant romantic approach to portraiture practiced contemporaneously by Thomas Sully (1783–1872), Henry Inman (1801–1846), and Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872).

Anelli's manner corresponded to that practiced by other immigrant Italian and German painters such as Spiridione Gambardella (active 1838–39), Gherlando Marsiglia (1792–1850), and Christian Mayr (about 1805–1851), whose works are all relatively little known today.

In 1839 the painter-critic John Kenrick Fisher (born 1807) distinguished these portraitists, along with Charles Cromwell Ingham (1796–1863), as the practitioners of an exceptional and distinctive style, which he denounced as "prompted and encouraged by an aberration of the public taste.

[5][6] The picture, hailed in the press as the largest painting in America—measuring 23 feet by 19 feet—was described as a masterwork and considered the "Boldest attempt at the highest effect in art, which has yet been made on this side of the Atlantic."

[3] In Portrait of a Child as Cupid, Anelli presents Van Rensselaer, Jr. in a spectacularly theatrical manner, revealed triumphantly by the parting of the heavy red draperies.