Selling Andrew Jackson: Ralph E. W. Earl and the Politics of Portraiture

INTRODUCTION

In a telling 1829 letter sent by Ralph E. W. Earl to his dear friend President Andrew Jackson, Earl pledged his loyalty, saying, I will assure you my dear friend my heart is with you, and the only pleasure I have in this life is identified with that of yours. In this correspondence, as in most of the correspondence between the two men, after discussing the issue at hand, Earl launched into political matters and pledged his devotion in closing, saying, No Administration for its time has ever given more general satisfaction than that of yours, and may God grant you with health to go through with this arduous task of reform, is the prayers of yours sincerely.¹ Written shortly after Jackson’s move to Washington, these statements appeared in a letter in which Earl apologized for not yet having joined his close companion, a recent widower, at the White House. Jackson desperately wanted Earl to relocate his studio from Nashville, where he had been working for the previous thirteen years, to the capital city during his administration. The correspondence well expresses the sincere devotion Earl, like many Jackson men in the day, felt toward their Old Hero. Over the course of Jackson’s political ascendency, he gained many supporters who championed his reform efforts in the United States. Dozens of them worked in tangible ways around the country to support Jackson, and during election periods committees were even mobilized in defense of Jackson’s past actions. Closer to home, Jackson’s inner circle (which included Earl) defended him staunchly. The significant difference between all of Jackson’s other supporters and Earl was that Earl was the only Jackson man who utilized visual culture in shaping and promoting Jackson’s image. Others applied the written and spoken word to great effect, but Earl created a visual expression for those words. Earl was arguably the first person in the United States to mobilize artwork in such an extensive way in support of a political candidate, though this practice is commonplace today. Thus the story and the art of Ralph E. W. Earl not only are worth acknowledgment but also create a unique study of the intimate blending of politics and art in American history.

This book describes the shaping of one man’s intriguing identity in nineteenth-century America by an artist who is little known today. It questions the role one’s visage might have played in crafting a reputation and identity in a time before photography when news traveled slowly, newspapers were openly biased, and reputations died hard. For Andrew Jackson, as this book argues, image was everything, and his decision to bring an image maker into his innermost circle was key in helping mold him into legendary status. Over the last twenty-one years of his life, the artist Ralph E. W. Earl found his own identity intimately bound up with that of Jackson. He systematically and quickly painted his way into Jackson’s inner circle and spent most of his last two decades under Jackson’s roof, producing scores of portraits of the American hero. Taken together, these images reveal the range of Jackson’s roles in a most positive light, and Jackson hoped they would ultimately define his legacy. Thus, Earl depicted Jackson in many guises, as General Jackson, as farmer Jackson, as civilian Jackson, and ultimately as President Jackson. Sold and given as gifts nationally and internationally and reproduced in hundreds of prints, these portraits worked to fashion a complete identity for the nation’s seventh president and the heroic general of the War of 1812, who many Americans believed had rescued them from the tyranny of the British once and for all. Earl’s portraits of Jackson reveal a respectable, if mythical, identity for the one-time rabble-rouser from the wilderness. Ultimately, Earl became Jackson’s intimate friend and portraitist, and his work cemented Jackson’s image for posterity. This book posits that it was with the help of Earl’s visual message, created in numerous portraits and prints, that Jackson became a larger-than-life hero. Earl’s visual fashioning of that image led to much of Jackson’s success, even helping lead him to the White House. Without the constant public scrutiny or paparazzi-like attention that today’s presidents and presidential candidates face, Jackson was well positioned to help shape his public image. Ultimately the collaboration between Jackson and Earl created a carefully crafted and meaningful visual identity for the nation’s seventh president.

Earl appeared at a critical juncture in Jackson’s life, just as he was gaining national prestige and long before he became a presidential candidate. When Andrew Jackson met Ralph E. W. Earl, in early 1817, when he sat for the first of many portraits, the two men had no idea that this meeting would alter the course of their lives in significant ways. As a young up-and-coming American artist, Earl had been in Paris copying paintings at the Louvre when he learned of General Jackson’s heroics in the Battle of New Orleans, in January 1815. After discussions with his fellow American artists in Paris, including John Vanderlyn and the printmaker Archibald Woodruff, all three men returned to the United States. Just as Charles Willson Peale and John Trumbull had done for George Washington in the wake of the American Revolution, they were eager to capitalize on the potential market for portraits of Jackson. Though Vanderlyn did go on to produce paintings and prints of Jackson, he was never interested in these projects. Similarly, Woodruff moved on to other commercial pursuits. Only Earl devoted his career to Jacksonian portraiture to great success, both financial and ideological. Rather than staying in Nashville only long enough to paint Jackson and the other heroes of New Orleans, as he had planned, Earl stayed permanently. Over more than two decades, Jackson remarkably went on to sit for Earl hundreds of times.

This book also addresses issues of political and visual identity in portraiture during the Jacksonian era. Through combined analysis of dozens of portraits of Andrew Jackson created by Earl, I argue that these were self-conscious constructions painted in consultation with Jackson and his team in order to help shape his nineteenth-century identity. Taking into account the chronology of Jackson’s career, I situate these portraits alongside his intended goals and public perceptions. Between 1817 and 1838 (the year of Earl’s death), he was a constant presence in Jackson’s life, and in addition to painting his portrait on an almost daily basis he became a wholehearted supporter of his politics and a dear friend. The two men’s visual goals were bound up with Jackson’s political ideals, and Earl’s portraits and prints aided in Jackson’s accomplishments. For example, in 1824, when Jackson was running for the presidency for the first time, Earl sought to capitalize on General Jackson’s heroic status and to remind the public of his victory in the battle of New Orleans by depicting him repeatedly in his iconic military uniform, directing the commanding victory in the War of 1812. When Jackson’s public image was tarnished through negative sensationalized media attention and political cartooning in the 1828 election, Earl drew upon past presidential portrait traditions and painted images of him as respectable and ready to take office, and Jackson was elected. Earl also made prints of these paintings for wide distribution to counteract the negative cartoons, and through these prints his images gained national exposure. Ultimately, I believe that Earl’s visual message must be considered a central element of Jackson’s political career.

At issue in any Jackson project are the tensions between his assumed status of gentility and his actual background as a self-made man, involving issues of class, and his personal and public maturation in a time of profound transition and considerable anxiety in the United States. As the period of the founding fathers gave way to the Age of Jackson, Earl applied to his portraits of Jackson traditional heroic imagery to assuage growing public concern about the transforming state of the nation and Jackson’s role in it. For example, by featuring a full-length image of General Jackson on the battlefield, Earl’s portraits of a heroic military leader borrow from a long tradition of both American and European Grand Manner portraiture. Furthermore, Earl’s images of President Jackson are informed by the young tradition of presidential portraiture established in part by Gilbert Stuart. These artistic precedents applied by Earl to Jackson’s portrait may have helped smooth fears about Jackson’s complicated background. After Jackson’s resounding victory at New Orleans at the end of the War of 1812, the United States was finally free to work out its destiny without European interference. Americans felt optimistic about the future while maintaining a sense of urgency about its direction, believing that if they did not get it right now, they might never have another chance. The New World was finally going to be solidified, and many of its people looked to Jackson for direction. The turbulent age that followed became the only period in American history known by the name of a single man.²

Earl’s role was central to shaping Jackson, Nashville, and, by extension, the art and identity of the mid-South and the nation more generally from the provincial to the genteel. His work both paralleled and contributed to the growing consciousness in the 1830s that American identity in art and politics was maturing beyond the generation of the founding fathers into a next phase, one that tested and challenged old models, even as it still looked to them for guidance. This book presents the verifiable facts of Earl’s life and analyzes his portrait style for the first time, relying particularly on his Jackson portraits. In order to reveal Earl’s substantial contributions to the development of American art and culture in the nineteenth century, the methodology of this book draws not only on the physical evidence of his paintings but also on their social, political, and historical context. Thus this project is exemplary of a number of critical issues such as the assimilation of European traditions in America, the development of national and presidential imagery, and the power of that imagery for political and social purposes.

In addition, the nature of Earl’s story is intriguing, and it reveals much about the wide array of opportunities available for aspiring white men in early America. As an artist, Earl was ideally suited to crafting Andrew Jackson’s developing image and contributing to the country’s cultural advancement. The son of Ralph Earl (1751–1801), an acquaintance of Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West in England and a leading portraitist of the Connecticut School in the late eighteenth century, Ralph E. W. Earl had grown up in artistic circles in New England, traveling with his itinerant artist father, and from a young age he was well aware of the power of art to craft identity. The elder Earl was a portraitist who often cited John Singleton Copley, as well as West and Reynolds, as his influences, and from him the younger Earl learned to paint with strong, flat lines and sharp focus. Earl Sr. also depicted many different types of sitters, both urban and rural, American and British, and exposure to this certainly aided the younger Earl’s development from a young age. Though Earl Sr. does not seem to have had a lasting impact on Earl’s success (because of his death from alcoholism when the younger Earl was about thirteen years old), early on he provided important contacts that would prove extremely useful to his son both in his early career in New England and later in Europe. During Earl’s itinerant childhood he was exposed to an enormous variety of social and cultural conditions, all of which he would later draw upon in his mature career. After Earl Sr.’s death, the young artist produced portraits in the Northeast with a base at Troy, New York, until 1809, when he continued the tradition among aspiring American artists of studying abroad, spending a year in London, four years in Norwich, England, and a final year in Paris. Returning to the United States in late 1815, he worked itinerantly for a year, beginning in Savannah before making his way to Nashville in early 1817. In addition to many other endeavors, such as opening a museum in Nashville along the lines of Charles Willson Peale’s in Philadelphia, Earl met and painted the South’s leading citizens in his first years there, including most especially Andrew Jackson. In Nashville and then in Washington after 1829, Earl also established a printmaking enterprise by spearheading engraving and lithographic projects based on his original portraits of Jackson. Study of these projects and the rich records and correspondence associated with them sheds light on early printing practices in America while revealing much about the intentions of Jackson and Earl. While working at the Hermitage, Earl also met Jackson’s niece, Jane Caffery, whom he married in May 1818. Unfortunately, she died in childbirth only a year into their marriage, and for the rest of his life Earl devoted himself to representing Jackson, which is where his greatest legacy lies. Earl then endeavored to cast Andrew Jackson as a heroic gentleman fit for the presidency. In dozens of original portraits of Old Hickory, Earl established a visual identity for the national hero.

In many ways, Earl forged a creative path unique in early American culture. Yet much of what he did falls in line with what a handful of other cultural entrepreneurs were also doing in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, which speaks to a significant aspect of nineteenth-century American cultural identity. Typical of his role as a hard-working, goal-oriented businessman, Earl was willing to manipulate his artistic output to make it work for him, depending on where and for whom he was working. His early career in New England followed the style and patterns of the itinerant artists who were working there at the time and continued the precedent established in the region by his father. His travel to London also was in line with the career paths of most ambitious American artists, although he somewhat uniquely supported his trip with his own portrait income and traveled without a patron or financial support from his family. His mature work in Tennessee drew equally from his years as a limner in New England and from his knowledge gained abroad of how to produce portraits that suited his clientele, ranging from the rural elite to General Jackson himself. As a case study in and of itself, Earl’s career trajectory reveals a great deal about early art and culture in America, especially in the understudied region of the mid-South. The levels of success Earl found as the president’s artist, however, was unprecedented.

In addition to his remarkable work with Andrew Jackson, Earl’s other portraits won him a place in the context of the history of art and culture in Tennessee that should not be overlooked. As the region’s first resident artist, he had a major influence on the development of an artistic environment there, and the style of portraiture that he applied continued to dominate the art of the region throughout the nineteenth century. It was not until after the Civil War that Tennessee had any widely established fine-arts presence, and Earl set the standard for this. Earl is also remarkable for the early impact he made on the culture of the mid-South. In addition to his portrait work, Earl seems to have played a role in nearly every early cultural endeavor in middle Tennessee, including vast archaeological study and the initiation of his museum.

Earl’s story reveals much about Jacksonian-era art history, an understudied topic, touching on such issues as the development of art in the South, portraiture as propaganda, and the impact of printmaking on nineteenth-century thought, revealing the critical nature of this text. It is important to see Earl in the milieu of early nineteenth-century artisan-entrepreneurs in New England, where he was working. Although this topic has been extensively addressed by the historian David Jaffee and others, Earl’s place in this context has received no attention, and his early portraits are discussed here for the first time.³ Though his work certainly was in line with the art of his time and place and reflects his limited access to scholarly training, these paintings also establish important precedents that Earl would carry through into his work with Jackson. Earl’s time spent abroad is also a previously unrecognized period in his development. It was Earl’s work as a folk portraitist in New England, coupled with all of his exposure abroad, that was critical to his success in his later work with Jackson’s image.

Following on that, to understand Earl’s time in Nashville, including his impact on the burgeoning community and his complete absorption into Nashville society, it is critical to place his work with Jackson in context. Although he never intended to stay there for his career, he found a successful niche in Nashville, was welcomed into the lives of the most important political players, and ultimately helped the city advance to the point that it was one that a president was proud to call home. Scholarship on Tennessee art history and on early nineteenth-century Nashville culture is limited, but it is worth noting that the city and its citizens, especially Earl, served as a boon to Jackson’s success.

For about the first ten years of his artist-sitter relationship with Jackson, Earl depicted him with one persona, that of military hero. Earl’s early works include the two monumental historical portraits Earl painted between 1818 and 1820. The nature of the relationship between Earl and Jackson was particularly significant to his artistic output. Throughout my discussions of Earl’s Jackson portraits, I analyze the works in the context of what they depict and why.

There was also widespread use of political cartooning and caricature in opposition to Jackson during the 1828 presidential election, and it is worth examining Earl’s artistic response to this. In preparation for the campaign, Earl had begun diversifying his image of Jackson by painting him in civilian attire, not only in his military uniform. Leading up to the election, Earl commissioned the nationally regarded printmaker James B. Longacre to make an engraving from his new portrait of Jackson. This project offers solid evidence that he was genuinely interested in shaping Jackson’s image through his Jackson portraits. Along with Jackson’s engraving, Earl also commissioned Longacre to create a print of one of his images of Rachel Jackson. The details of this and other images of her are discussed in depth here for the first time. The images of Jackson, especially her print, combined with the civilian print of Old Hickory, speak to Earl’s desire to help shape their combined national identity in response to all of the criticism they faced during the election.

Earl’s images of Jackson after his election to the presidency demonstrate a changed approach to the subject, which carries over in Earl’s print project for Jackson’s 1832 re-election bid. Once Jackson was in office, Earl felt much freer to shape and mold his image in a number of new ways, and this was especially true during his second term. The range of portraits of Jackson that Earl produced during Jackson’s presidency includes a surprising equestrian portrait and the final monumental one aimed at setting his image for posterity.

Earl himself was a significant historical player in his own right, and I reveal heretofore unrecognized connections and friendships between him and the most well-known artists of his era. His cultured status and society connections, combined with the public’s awareness of his intimacy with the president, helped further Jackson’s goal of improving his national reputation, especially in Washington and points north. Earl’s work offers a new channel of inquiry in terms of the Jackson presidency, and examining it adds to our scant knowledge about an important American artist and his formative role in history, in addition to bolstering the limited scholarship on art produced in the South as well as Jacksonian-era portraiture.

Early nineteenth-century art in the South is a field that is ripe for the type of consideration offered by this book. The American journalist W. J. Cash opened his seminal 1941 study, The Mind of the South, by stating that there exists among us … a profound conviction that the South is another land, sharply differentiated from the rest of the American nation, and exhibiting within itself a remarkable homogeneity.⁴ Still today, more than two generations later, many consider the South another land. In the study of art, this differentiation has resulted in a limited awareness of art produced in the American South, especially before the twentieth century. While the South certainly is a distinct region, the nature of the United States and its artistic and cultural heritage cannot be fully understood without a more complete view of the entire nation’s cultural history, especially during the antebellum era. Uncovering forgotten artists, Earl in this case, will help shed much-needed light on the region’s history as a whole. As Earl’s story reveals, these forgotten Southern artists actually participated regularly in projects with national implications. Mining this information helps expand what has been a limited view.

The late curator Ella-Prince Knox bemoaned this idea in her catalog of Southern painting, saying that, for all the familiarity with the literature, architecture, and general culture of the South, there has been a haunting lack of attention to its art.⁵ More recently, the art historian Maurie McInnis has more pointedly acknowledged and accounted for these omissions, observing that broad characterizations of art in the American South are problematic because our knowledge of its history is still too incomplete in most cases to allow for comprehensive analysis.⁶ Many pieces critical to the whole remain unresearched, underdiscussed, or undiscovered. In other cases, an absence of archival records impedes research. As a result, the true nature of American art more generally cannot be understood until its broader development outside the urban centers of the Northeast, in Nashville for example, receives greater attention.⁷

A study of Earl’s career spent painting Jackson also reveals innumerable ways that he influenced the history of American art and culture. Perhaps long forgotten because his career matured in Nashville, Earl enjoyed a success there that hinged on the time he spent growing up in New England and studying abroad, and his most significant works were created in Washington, D.C., in the Jackson White House. Therefore, a consideration of Earl should not be limited to a characterization of him as a Southern artist but should also seek to reveal Earl as a significant component of Jacksonian America more generally. Earl’s career is unlike any other in the nineteenth century and has perhaps been forgotten largely because it does not fit any particular mold or category. Though he worked in the South, like many artists there he was not a Southerner. He was also the rare resident artist in the South at a time when itinerancy was the norm. Earl studied in England and France and spent twenty years as Andrew Jackson’s artist, but he is still considered a naïve artist by some.⁸ His career also involved innumerable academic endeavors, such as the founding, in 1818, of the Nashville Museum. It is this multifaceted identity that has made Earl problematic for scholars. But a study of his work also reveals a self-made man who actively sought and achieved his goals, thus placing Earl at the center of the American experience.

Attribution of Earl’s works has also been problematic, and as a result untold numbers of his early paintings are lost or unidentified. Earl did not sign or, it seems, keep records for the vast majority of his portraits, especially after his career and financial position with Jackson were firmly established. Although he was active as a painter for more than four years in Troy, New York, between 1805 and 1809, no works from this period have been identified. Similarly, only three of the dozens of paintings he created while abroad between 1810 and 1814 are known, and none of the portraits he created as an itinerant artist in the South in 1815 and 1816 have surfaced. The Jackson works are also mostly unsigned, but their provenances tend to be better recorded because of the subject’s significance. Thus large sections of Earl’s development as an artist cannot be studied because we lack the visual evidence.

Many have also found it difficult to categorize Earl and his style. Earl’s frequent altering of his style to suit sitter and place further complicates things. Earl’s paintings have been considered everything from Americana and folk art to political icons, historical artifacts, and works of fine art, and their reception seems to have changed over time. Prized in Earl’s day for their truth to nature, they have since been exhibited as primitive and naïve works and often forgotten altogether.⁹ Despite Earl’s success as a limner at the least, his paintings have frequently been denigrated by contemporary scholars. Art historians have tended to consider his work on the basis of its artistic merits alone. Earl has often been dismissed for lacking in artistic ability (for example, in comparison with contemporaries like John Vanderlyn), and his works have been disparaged as a result. The historian James C. Kelly characterized Earl’s work by saying that He painted numerous portraits of Jackson, some of distinction but many repetitious in nature and mediocre in quality, which were political icons more than works of art.¹⁰ Kelly also noted that Some [Tennessee] artists lacked the ability to penetrate personality even when the subject was well known to him, as Jackson was to Earl.¹¹ Jackson’s contemporaries would have certainly disagreed with this statement, and in his day Earl’s Jackson portraits were praised for being true to nature. Susan Symonds admitted this in her 1968 master’s thesis, saying, Earl’s images of Jackson were highly regarded, on the whole, by Jackson’s admirers. However, she went on to say that they served as utilitarian art, their function being more important than the artistic rendering. Symonds also went on to criticize Earl’s style, saying his palette could be garish; the colors are vivid and used locally, with little modeling…. The paintings are stiff and flat.¹² Perhaps in part because of the twentieth-century criticism Earl’s works have received, scholars have failed to properly recognize their cultural, historical, and artistic significance. In addition, because he often painted several similar versions of the same portrait, his work is frequently considered monotonous. This criticism is voiced despite the fact that more well-known artists such as Gilbert Stuart used exactly the same tactics as Earl, taking an original portrait from life and creating many copies of it in order to meet demand. In many cases, Earl’s portraits are also unsigned and undated, making it very difficult to tell which portrait in a group of similar works was the original, and this is troubling for some. Attribution is also sometimes uncertain for Earl’s mostly unsigned and regularly overpainted works.

From what remains, though, it is obvious that Earl’s life and career offer a significant case study in the development of art, politics, and social change during the Jacksonian era and that he contributed greatly to the developing history and progress of American art. His career also spans some of the most critical periods in American history. He was raised in colonial New England and witnessed the maturation of the country in the Jacksonian era, with close ties not only to the South but to the nation via Jackson. Thus, a study of his works, which date from 1800 to 1838, offers a fascinating glimpse into some significant aspects of artistic development in antebellum America. Although the two men had opposite personalities, Earl grew to revere Jackson and Jackson respected Earl, and their close daily interaction enriched the careers of both men. Earl’s career took place at a time when it was extremely difficult for an artist in America to make a living producing artworks of any genre. While American artists who are more well respected today were producing portraits of Jackson in the midst of their own financial despair (John Vanderlyn being the best example), Earl made a comfortable living from portrait painting in Nashville (and subsequently Washington), and he stayed very busy.¹³

Because of Earl’s unique position first as a colonial New England painter and later as Southern portraitist of the Jackson era, there is also great disparity in what has been written about him, and no one has ever taken the entire scope of his oeuvre into account when considering his work. The variety of his painting styles should be attributed to his ability to manipulate his style according to the region and the patron, and scholars have repeatedly failed to realize this and have instead either dismissed or ignored his work.

Julie Aronson accounts for the dismissive treatment of Earl’s work in the 1992 exhibition catalog American Naïve Paintings. Of the Jackson portraits, she says today these portraits are valued for their historical merits, but are criticized for their repetitiousness and their absence of psychological insight. They lack the tender human quality and unsophisticated decorative appearance that give his early portraits so much appeal to twentieth-century viewers.¹⁴ Like most scholars who have approached Earl’s works, Aronson prefers Earl’s naïve style, which he applied in New England prior to his study in Europe. At issue for many scholars who have addressed Earl’s work is the conflict Earl faced between applied style and sheer demand, especially in the Jackson years. As this book discusses, Earl was extremely prolific, and it seems that he was often willing to produce less than his best work in order to keep up with the high demand for portraits of Jackson. One interesting surviving anecdote describes the circumstances of an unknown Earl portrait: To answer the public cry for a glimpse of Jackson, [Major William B.] Lewis ordered his portrait painted. R. E. W. Earl very likely did the job. This huge and awkward rival to Stuart’s Washington seems to have taken no longer to paint than from sunup to sundown. It was hung over the marble mantel on the west wall of the entrance hall. The hero was shown in military blue, draped in more braid and golden stars than the East Room itself. He was all symbol, and it was the symbol even most of Jackson’s intimates really knew best, not the man.¹⁵ Although this portrait does not seem to be extant, this story reveals Earl’s willingness to create portraits as the situation dictated, and this helps account for the wide range of style and quality in his extant works. It also helps reveal, as this in-depth study of Jackson portraits does, that Earl was not always trying to penetrate Jackson’s inner soul in his paintings but rather sought to fashion the symbol of Jackson for the country. While his quick work helped him maintain a high standard of living in his own time, it seemingly sacrificed his reputation for posterity.

While the place of Earl’s portraits in historical documentation is certainly warranted and should not be ignored, their value as works of art is equally critical, and a broader understanding of Earl’s iconography will strengthen the scope of American art in the critical Jacksonian era. Earl learned from those traditions that preceded him, both European and American, and carved a special niche for himself and his Jackson portraits in a transitional period in American history, manipulating his style and career path as needed. Despite the criticisms his work has faced, according to the noted Nashville historian Mary French Caldwell, He, last of all, would have sought the approbation of art critics. Continuing, Caldwell suggests that simple justice to his skill demands that he be given better rank among the early American artists and wider recognition of his brilliant, useful career than is usually accorded him.¹⁶ By telling the extraordinary story of Earl’s life and placing his work among the most important events of the Jacksonian era, I hope to reveal the significance of this early American artisan-entrepreneur.

Indeed, Earl often gets more credit in museum catalog entries than in academic scholarship. One of the few glowing reports of Earl’s contributions to American art history was written by Abigail Linville, collections manager of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, who acknowledges the full scope of Earl’s endeavors: "The scope of Earl’s contribution to the state of Tennessee and art in the South is immeasurable. He not only worked as