Excerpt from Portraits of Columbus: A Monograph
Governor Fairchild:
In behalf of the Historical Society, I have the honor - and it is a very pleasant duty - to thank you for your generous gift. Nothing you could bring us from the ancient kingdom where you have so ably represented our country, could be more acceptable to us. It is a present exactly in keeping with our endeavors during a whole generation. One by one have we hung up in our Picture Gallery the likenesses of our State pioneers, as well as of others famous each after his own fashion in our annals. But the grand link thus far lacking in the chain of our pictorial history, you were among the first to observe to be missing, and you have made haste to supply that missing link.
In this labor of love you have followed the footsteps of an illustrious predecessor. When Jefferson was the American minister in Paris, about 1784, he engaged an artist to take the best copy possible of what passed for the most authentic Columbian likeness in existence, - the Medici portrait in Florence - and the original, as most critics think, of the present you bring us to-day. This painting was with Jefferson during his Presidency, and he writes about it as one of his chief jewels at Monticello in 1814. In his drawing room there, it hung the second among four portraits on the left as one entered.
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