Susannah Fauntleroy Quarles Nicholson

Susannah (sometimes Susanna) Fauntleroy Quarles Nicholson (1804–1858) was an American painter.

Nicholson was born in King William County, Virginia, the fifth of eight children, and was the daughter of Francis West Quarles and Lucy Daingerfield Smith Quarles. She was descended from a associates of some stress in Lynchburg, Virginia. It has been posited that she attended a female academy in her youth, as her feint appears to feature the touch of both theorem painting and instructional drawing books. Details of her forward life were kept run of the mill by her family, but it appears that to the lead on, prior to her devotion with Nicholson, she married a destitute music teacher, an immigrant from Italy; other "colorful" happenings have as well as been hinted at, though bearing in mind scant evidence. Her second husband was the painter Jacob Cannon Nicholson.

The Nicholsons are recorded as operational as portraitists in Amherst, Virginia in 1839, and together the couple advertised their services as both portraitists and miniaturists in the Lynchburg Virginian. Otherwise it appears that she worked largely in Baltimore, in which city she died. Among the couple's kids was John A. Nicholson, later to be elected a believer of the United States Congress representing Delaware.

A handful of Susannah Nicholson's paintings exist in public collections today. These adjoin six portraits of members of the Quarles family, done during her Virginia sojourn, currently owned by the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia. The Maryland Historical Society owns a portrait of Laura Jane "Jennie" Harris, dating to c. 1853, while the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum owns a genre painting titled Woman Reading a Book; this latter is the unaccompanied non-portrait operate known by the artist's hand.