biografia di Ralph E.W. EARL (1785-1838)

Birth place: England

Death place: Nashville, TN

Profession: Portrait painter

Studied: his father in Northampton, MA; England with Benjamin West and John Trumbull

Work: New Orleans Council Hall; The Hermitage (Home of President Andrew Jackson),Nashville, TN; Tennessee State Mus.

Comments: Ralph Eleaser Whitesides Earl was the son of Ralph Earl and his second wife and was probably brought to America by his father as a child, for they were working together in Connecticut as early as 1800. The younger Earl went to England in 1809, spent four years in Norwich, then visited France and returned to the United States in 1815. As an itinerant artist he worked during the next few years in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and along the Mississippi. Through his marriage in 1818 to a niece of Mrs. Andrew Jackson, Earl became an intimate of the Jacksons and lived with them at The Hermitage," (near Nashville, TN), until 1829 when he followed the new President to Washington DC and became part of that household. For the rest of his life Earl devoted himself to painting portraits of Jackson for the President's friends. When Jackson left the White House in 1837, Earl accompanied him back to the Hermitage, where Earl died the following year. Because of his position in Andrew Jackson's entourage in Washington, Earl was humorously referred to as "The King's Painter." He founded Tennessee's first museum (modeled on Charles Willson Peale's Phila. mus.) in 1818.

Sources: G&W; Hart, "Life Portraits of Andrew Jackson"; Bolton, Miniature Painters; Alabama Dept. of Archives and History (cited by WPA (Ala.), Historic Records Survey); Knoxville (TN) Gazette, July 28, 1818 ; Sawitsky, Ralph Earl 1751-1801; Bassett, Correspondence of Andrew Jackson. More recently, see Gerdts, Art Across America, vol. 2: 135; Encyclopaedia of New Orleans Artists, 123; Kelly, "Landscape and Genre Painting in Tennessee, 1810-1985," 22-23 (w/illus.)"