Fine Books & Manuscripts

JACKSON, Andrew (1767–1845). –– EARL, Ralph E.W., artist (English, 1785–1838). Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage. Boston: Pendleton’s Lithography, [1832]. Lithograph portrait drawn on stone by John Henry Bufford after a painting by Earl now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, mild spotting at margins. (Image view 565 x 419 mm). Framed to conservation standards in its original Jacksonian–period ebonized moulding with gilded lamb’s–tongue liner and corner decorations. In 1818, Ralph E.W. Earl married a niece of Andrew Jackson’s after returning to the United States working primarily as an itinerant portrait artist. After her death, he joined the Jackson household becoming Jackson’s “court painter” to meet the demands for his portrait. Earl devoted the rest of his career to painting portraits of Jackson that included more than two dozen portraits of the President during Jackson’s eight years in the White House. This portrait by Earl was considered the “best of Jackson up to that time” and its execution on stone by Bufford, as Peters notes in America on Stone, is “in the very first rank” of his contribution to Americana.