When there is added to Wise’s description of the interior of the Hermitage of this period the view of the building and grounds included in Earl’s 1831 portrait of General Jackson, the picture of the house as it was from 1819 to 1831 is complete. The _Nashville Republican_ and _Tennessee Gazette_, on Thursday, August 25, 1831, repeated a criticism of this portrait which had appeared in the _Washington Globe_.
It reads, in part: “The artists of Boston announce it a ‘first rate work,’ and the intimate friends of the President consider it the most perfect likeness ever taken of him. It is not only recommended by this circumstance, but it is rendered doubly interesting as a sort of historical picture, in which the taste and talent of the designer is, in high degree manifested. The President stands alone in the solitude of the Hermitage. The scene is most accurately delineated. The house and surrounding grounds, although thrown somewhat in the distance, are identified to all acquainted with the spot, by its most striking features....”
To the west is seen a small square building which may have been used by General Jackson as an office. There is a tradition that it was Earl’s studio and, since the artist was a member of the household in 1818 and 1819, it is more than likely true. There is a remote possibility that it was the kitchen, for the dining room, according to Wise’s description, was “the northwest room,” but it is more probable that the old kitchen was located near the present one, on the north side of the building. (Since 1933 a brick building, in the style of the period, has been erected on this foundation.) Traces of the foundation of this small building are still visible. It is important to observe further in this portrait which, in 1831, was accepted by the public and Nashville and in Washington as a historically accurate view of the Hermitage, there was still no evidence of the famous cedar-lined, guitar-shaped drive.
This portrait, which from an historical standpoint is probably the most important of the Jackson portraits, was presented to the Ladies’ Hermitage Association in 1944 by Mrs. Charles W. Frear, of Troy, New York, in memory of her husband. For many years the Association did not know the location of the original, although it had long used a reproduction in its catalogue which, it appears, had been given to the organization about 1901 by McClure’s Magazine. It is interesting that the acquisition of this famous portrait by the Ladies’ Hermitage Association was perhaps due, in part, to the interest of a member of the artist Earl’s family.
