ANDREW JACKSON IN 1838. AGE 71. THREE VIEWS OF A BUST MODELED BY J. T. HART.
From the original marble, in the State Capitol at Frankfort, Kentucky. Joel Tanner Hart was born in Clark County, Kentucky, in 1810, and died in Florence, Italy, March 2, 1877. He first handled tools as a stone-mason, then as a stone-cutter, and finally as a sculptor of rare realistic power in his portrait busts and of delicate refinement in his ideal creations. Apart from some studies in anatomy at Transylvania University, Hart seems to have had but little education or art instruction until he went to Florence in 1849. But he had ingenuity, and invented an apparatus for obtaining mechanically the outline of a head from life. He also constructed poems. which he esteemed as superior to his sculpture, proving new that "no man is a judge in his own case." His nude female figure with a Cupid, which he called first "Venus" and later "Purity," but which is now dubbed "The Triumph of Chastity," is quite as well composed and modeled as Powers's more famous Greek Slave. It was presented to his native State by "the Women of the Blue Grass," and is in the corridor of the court-house at Lexington. The bust of General Jackson reproduced here is signed, "The original modeled at the Hermitage, U. S. A., in December, 1838 by J. T. Hart, set."
