Two paintings of interest on the Getty Museum Web site include Hubert Robert’s lush romantic Hermit Praying in the Ruins of a Roman Temple and Lorenzo Costa’s pen and ink depiction of the Thebaid in A Thebaid: Monks and Hermits in a Landscape.
For the Robert: http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/objects/o918.html.
For the Costa: http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/objects/o204.html.
Sweets of Solitude
The Sweets of Solitude by Amos Wilson, called the “Pennsylvania hermit,” was printed in Boston in 1822. The only copy of the book is in the Free Library of Philadelphia, and has been scanned and placed on the Web at http://www.seclusion.com. It can be downloaded in .doc format, the whole book being 21 pages. Yahoo! calls it a work of fiction, and surely the melodramatic account reads that way, but the Webmaster assures me that he toured the cave in Indian Echo Cavern, Pennsylvania, where Amos Wilson, a hermit calling himself a Christian, lived for 19 years.