English: Exhibition Label

   Andrew Jackson transformed the office of the presidency into one of dynamic leadership and national initiative. No longer would the chief executive be merely an armchair overseer of Congress and the nation at large. Moreover, his sweeping reform program extolled the principles of democratic government by the will of the people. These tenets of Jacksonian democracy still resonate today.

This portrait of Jackson by his close friend Ralph E. W. Earl—a widower who was a frequent guest at the White House—depicts the president as he looked in 1830. Jackson stands on the grounds of the Hermitage, his Tennessee plantation near Nashville. In 1832 the Pendleton Lithography Company in Boston published a popular lithograph after this portrait, which Earl referred to as his “Farmer Jackson” image. The painting is on loan from the descendants of Jackson’s staunch friend and political patron Francis Preston Blair.