General Jackson was very kind to him, and won his lasting esteem and gratitude.  Upon being asked if he would sit for his bust, the old hero hesitated, and, looking at the artist nervously, asked:  “Do you daub any thing over the face?  Because,” he added, “I recollect poor Mr. Jefferson got nearly smothered when they tried to take his bust.  The plaster hardened before they got ready to release him, and they pounded it with mallets till they nearly stunned him, and then almost tore off a piece of his ear in their haste to pull off a sticking fragment of the mold.  I should not like that.”  Powers assured him that such a terrible process would not be necessary, but that he only wished to look at him for an hour a day, sitting in his chair.  The General brightened up at once, and cordially told him it would give him pleasure to sit for him.  He at once installed the artist in a room in the White House, and gave him a sitting of an hour every morning until the model was done.

Mr. Powers regards the bust of Jackson as one of his best efforts, and the President himself was very much pleased with it.  After he had completed his model, Mr. Edward Everett brought Baron Krudener, the Prussian Minister to Washington, to see it.  The Baron was a famous art critic, and poor Powers was terribly nervous as he showed him the bust.  The Baron examined it closely, and then said to the artist, “You have got the General completely:  his head, his face, his courage, his firmness, his identical self; and yet it will not do!  You have also got all his wrinkles, all his age and decay.  You forget that he is President of the United States and the idol of the people.  You should have given him a dignity and elegance he does not possess.  You should have employed your art, sir, and not merely your nature.”  The artist listened in silence, and Mr. Everett stood by without saying a word, “conscious,” as he afterward confessed, “of a very poor right to speak on such a subject,” after listening to so famous a critic. “I did not dare,” says Powers, “in my humility and reverence for these two great men, to say what I wanted to in reply; to tell the Baron that my ‘art’ consisted in concealing art, and that my ‘nature’ was the highest art I knew or could conceive of.  I was content that the ‘truth’ of my work had been so fully acknowledged, and the Baron only confirmed my resolution to make truth my only model and guide in all my future undertakings.”

One of his sitters in Washington was Senator Preston, of South Carolina, who conceived such an interest in him that he wrote to his brother, General Preston, of Columbia, South Carolina, a gentleman of great wealth, urging him to come to the artist’s assistance, and send him to Italy.  General Preston at once responded to this appeal, of which Powers was ignorant, and wrote to the artist to draw on him for a thousand dollars, and go to Italy at once, and to draw on him annually for a similar sum for several years.