ANDREW JACKSON IN 1845. AGE 78. PAINTED BY HEALY.
From the original portrait painted by G. P. A. Healy and owned by Colonel Andrew Jackson, Cincinnati, Ohio. Canvas, 20 by 24 inches. George Peter Alexander Healy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, July 15, 1813, and died in Chicago, Illinois, June 14, 1895. In 1836 he went to Paris, where he lived off and on for the best part of his life; but his American home was in Chicago. His industry and facility of execution were marvelous; the portraits he painted number many hundreds. For years he was the fashionable painter of Americans, whether at home or abroad, owing chiefly, no doubt, to his employment by Louis Philippe to furnish pictures for Versailles. His success was phenomenal, considering the low merit of his art. His work is thoroughly artificial. It lacks simplicity and refinement, effects being sought by theatrical posing and exaggerations. Healy was a charming companion, and published late in life a volume of "Reminiscences" which is readable but not reliable, a condition commonly attending the recording from memory of events that happened long before. He gives in this book considerable space to the incidents connected with the painting of the portrait of Jackson here reproduced, which was begun May 1, 1845, and was completed May 30th, only a few days before the general's death, the painter being still at the Hermitage when Jackson died. But several of Healy's statements in this connection are erroneous, such as that the "original portrait" is in the Corcoran Art Gallery, and that he painted a second portrait of Jackson from life. The Corcoran Gallery picture is a replica, a very interesting illustration of the marked differences and distinctions between original pictures, replicas, and copies; while the second portrait painted by Healy at the Hermitage was a composite picture, made from the portraits by Earl and his own just completed, because he wanted a portrait of Jackson in his prime for Versailles. Healy's account of Jackson's declaring that "not for all the kings in Christendom" would he sit and that he wanted to die in peace, and then of his affectionately yielding to the solicitation of his beloved daughter-in-law, together with the account of the death-bed scene, shows how "Old Hickory's" temperament and characteristics remained the same to the last.
