The 1853 portrait may be the first of a woman to hang in the office, said Interim President James Underwood at the unveiling. Underwood said he saw a photograph of the portrait on the cover of a brochure for the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, where it had been restored. “When I saw that, I knew we had to have this for the President's Office,” he said.
Colleagues have described Urania's likeness as “striking” and “formidable,” Underwood said of the three-by-four-foot portrait that hangs in an intricate gilded frame behind Underwood's desk (which belonged to Arthur) in the southeast corner of the office.
As a work of art, “Sully's fluid brushstrokes create a gentle, soft composition and the warm pinks of her flesh contrast beautifully with the grays of the spare and simple background,” according to notes by Rachel Seligman, curator of the College's
collection. Prof. Louisa Matthew, an art historian, pointed to Sully's skill at creating a “slick” canvas with a minimum of brush strokes, his use of pink coral and pale blue, and his mastery at
capturing the intricacy of Urania's veil and fur wrap.
Sully was a prominent painter of the 19th century, perhaps best known for his portraits of women. During his 71-year career, he did some 2,600 paintings, 2,000 of which were portraits.
Urania Sheldon Nott's “power behind the throne” grew stronger as her husband was incapacitated by a series of strokes that began in 1860. Archivist Ellen Fladger reports the annals of Union history reveal little of Urania Nott's role as wife of the president, or her views of life at Union. Most of what we know about her appears in the Encyclopedia of Union College History, edited and compiled by Wayne Somers.
Urania had been operating women's schools in Utica and Schenectady when she met Nott. They married in 1842, a year and a half after the death of his second wife, Gertrude. He was 69, she 35.
Diarist Jonathan Pearson, professor and treasurer, wrote in 1860 that Nott “is completely under ‘Uranie's' thumb now, and has to do just as she says.” After a debilitating stroke in 1863 until his death three years later, she answered his correspondence and served as his spokesperson.
Her role galled some in the Union community. There was dissension over whether Vice President Laurens Perseus Hickok should succeed the incapacitated president. Some maintained that Mrs. Nott was overly involved in College finances; she was a guardian of the Nott Trust Fund, created after a state investigation of Nott's practice of co-mingling the College's assets with his own. She also wanted a location other than Vale Cemetery as a College burial ground, but her husband and Pearson supported the Vale idea, which was adopted.
After Nott's death in 1866, the Trustees granted Mrs. Nott, not yet 60, a stipend of $1,800 and agreed to pay for all repairs to her residence. She continued to live in the President's House-a right guaranteed her when it was finished in 1861-until her death in 1886.
Urania Nott spent the rest of her life doing community service in Schenectady. She was president of the Ladies Benevolent Society, and first director of the Home for the Friendless (today known as the Heritage Home for Women). A memorial booklet said of her passing, “Seldom, as in her case, does a whole city feel itself bereaved by a common loss, and while it mourns her departure, unite to call her memory blessed.”