ANDREW JACKSON IN 1845. AGE 78. BY ADAMS.
From the original daguerreotype by Dan Adams of Nashville, Tennessee, now owned by Colonel Andrew Jackson of Cincinnati. Size, 118 inches by 34 of an inch, with the head but one-quarter of an inch in diameter. Enlargement by Charles Truscott of Philadelphia. This daguerreotype was taken in Jackson's bedroom at the Hermitage, on April 15, 1845, when the general was very weak and his whole body much swollen from dropsy. His granddaughter Mrs. Rachel Jackson Lawrence writes, "I have a vivid recollection of the arrangement for taking this likeness, in which I was greatly interested. He was much opposed to having it taken and was very feeble at the time. I still have the old plates of some earlier daguerreotypes, but they are entirely faded out." This is without doubt the most important portrait of Jackson in existence. There is a living human interest excited in looking upon a man's reflected image that no Rembrandt. Reynolds, or Stuart can arouse. The daguerreotype is as near to the living man as we can get. Not even the sensitive paper of the photographic negative intervenes.—Owing to the intended reproduction of the whole-length of Jackson by Thomas Sully in the Corcoran Art Gallery and its withdrawal on finding it a copy dated 184s, instead of an original dated 1825, as published by the Gallery, no mention will be found here of Sully's life portraits of Jackson.
