Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the portraitist Jacob Eichholtz was listed in the first class of the “English School” of the newly established Franklin College (now Franklin and Marshall). He was apprenticed to a coppersmith and learned the rudiments of art from a sign painter. He began to paint profile portraits similar to those of the Sharples family and Charles Balthazar Julien Saint Mémin (1770 1852) around 1806. Eichholtz received some instruction from Thomas Sully (1783 1872) in 1808, and from Gilbert Stuart in Boston in 1812. Eichholtz lived in Philadelphia from 1823 to 1832. He exhibited regularly at the Society of Artists from 1811 to 1814, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1811 to 1862, and was also active in the Artists' Fund Society in Philadelphia and at the Philadelphia Art Association. He was appointed a director of the Pennsylvania Academicians in 1829. Eichholtz returned to Lancaster in 1832 and remained there for the rest of his life. Although Eichholtz worked in a somewhat naeive style like his contemporary Robert Street, he painted many eminent personages in Lancaster, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Baltimore during his long career.