JAMES JACKSON JARVES’S ART-IDEA
It could be argued that James Jackson Jarves entered modern art history in the 1930s, or perhaps it was at that moment when he assumed the dignified and conspicuous place he now occupies in the historiography of American art and art criticism. In 1933, Theodore Sizer, then director of the Yale University Art Gallery, reintroduced this “forgotten New Englander” with a paper read at various venues, including the annual meeting of the College Art Association. It was published in the New England Quarterly, and an entry for Jarves appeared in the Dictionary of American Biography.1 A few articles by other scholars followed in the 1940s, with the most extensive critical biographies appearing in 1951 and 1952.2 Those studies, noted in the introduction, were Francis Steegmuller’s The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves and John Peter Simoni’s Ph.D. dissertation “Art Critics and Criticism in Nineteenth-Century America.” Beginning with Sizer, Jarves was resuscitated as a heroic idealist, struggling against the provincial American preference for naturalism in art and tirelessly expending his resources to teach that American public about art’s development and about the morals it expressed. Such a narrative is not surprising for the 1930s and 1940s, as many scholars sought to find lineages and/or explanations for contemporary painting that rejected naturalism in favor of expressiveness or abstraction.
Regardless, Jarves had not, in fact, been totally neglected previously, as his collection of early Italian paintings at Yale had drawn consistent, though not voluminous, critical attention from the late nineteenth century onward. That attention, however, cast Jarves in a different light, as it focused on questions of faulty attribution, often downgrading the value of individual works or questioning their aptness as examples of the historical lesson the collection claimed to demonstrate.3 There would seem, therefore, to be more than one image of Jarves. His reputation, like that of many historical figures, has been subject to change over time. This, too, is not surprising, and in Jarves’s case there is evidence to back up both images. Indeed, even in the studies that tend toward the heroic Jarves, there are references to the ill-informed or even manipulative Jarves.4 Zeal and inaccuracy might easily go hand in hand. Of course, the character of Jarves is not the issue here; the substance of his art theory is. This chapter is concerned with understanding the ideas about art that he hoped to foster among Americans in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and it seeks answers by analyzing his texts. The premise is that we can reread his writing—focusing on the structures of his critical rhetoric, the aesthetic schema he employed, and the methodological principles he invoked—in order to comprehend his positions. Issues of Jarves’s character may emerge, but they arise from his words, not vice versa.
In fact, in analyzing Jarves’s writing, questions about the suitability of his current reputation do develop from disjunctions between what he represents in the historiography and what we can learn from the manner in which he constructed his arguments. Jarves figures prominently in modern periodization of nineteenth-century American art, largely in the heroic mode that began with Sizer. This Jarves is associated with the post–Civil War cosmopolitanism that increased American openness toward international aesthetic trends and promoted a new critical attitude toward the long-standing native bias in favor of verisimilitude. He supposedly brought a more historical, sociocultural approach to the evaluation of art. Similar to the distaste for naturalism, Jarves is also frequently credited—or blamed—for the decline in popularity of landscape painting as the foremost genre of an American school.5 Thus, he is linked to the incipiently modern taste that we associate with the postwar decades. He stands as a figure who helps periodize American art, forming part of the narrative of change, dislocation, renewal, and modernity that is generally employed to characterize the state of art production and reception after the Civil War.
This image of Jarves only partially fits what we read in his texts, however. The incipient modernism cannot readily be reconciled with the positions formed by his critical discourse. Or, some elements of it can be found to correspond, but only superficially. Other aspects of his criticism seem to contradict the uses to which it has been put in modern historiography. How does this situation come about? The task at hand, to repeat, is to consider this question by means of Jarves’s writing, and with the premise that modern historiographic desires are not so straightforward as those that perhaps motivated Sizer and his peers to disinter a Jarves somewhat more brilliant than the one his predecessors buried.
Jarves’s third book on art, The Art-Idea, published in 1864, is the most significant of his works in the historiography of American art and the one we take up here. As the book that devoted six chapters to American art, it is his most frequently cited work.6 His opinions about American art come across quite clearly in that text; he did not hide his antipathy to the work of many painters, several of whom were then favorites. He sneered, for instance, at those who demonstrated a Düsseldorf manner, comparing their work to “furniture paintings, being mechanical and imitative in feature, seldom rising above illustrative art” (Art-Idea, 177).7 (He seems to have mistaken the source of the Düsseldorf influence as a New York gallery opened by “an enterprising German,” later referring to it as “an accidental importation” [177, 181].) By contrast, the influence of France and Italy produced much better results. For example, French-trained William Morris Hunt (1824–1879)8—like John La Farge (1835–1910), whom we will encounter further on—was perhaps a bit weak in drawing according to Jarves, but he demonstrated a “feeling for great qualities,” primarily in his “subtilties of expression and color … so deliciously done, and with so tender or fascinating sentiment” (184). Of the “indigenous” school of “academic” art—represented by esteemed artists such as Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) and Daniel Huntington (1816–1906)9—he had little to say that was complementary. “Artists educated after this manner,” he claimed, “will never wholly free themselves from the bondage of an imposed style and outside dictation” (188). And landscape painting, which he acknowledged as the most “thoroughly American branch of painting, based upon the facts and tastes of the country and the people,” was flawed for being so “literal” and as a consequence was “quite divested of human association” (189). It was American to its core in its “realism, vigor, enterprise, and freshness … viewing nature rarely in other than external and picturesque aspects, and little given to poetry or ideas. … Partaking of the enterprise of commerce, it sends its sons to Brazil, to the Amazon, to the Andes. … It pauses at no difficulties, distance, expense. … The speculating blood infuses itself into art … [and] it will reduce art to the level of trade” (194–95).
Thus, Jarves’s preferences were clearly asserted, and they appear modern for their frankness, for the denigration of the literal and the academic, and for the preference for those Continental influences that were evocative of the “poetical” and the “ideal.” Jarves’s freshness is also thought to emerge from his correlation of national cultural characteristics with tendencies in art and taste. His discussion of American landscape painting as an enterprise fueled by “speculating blood” is a case in point. In other words, there are reasons to read Jarves in the manner ascribed to him in the modern historiography. However, if we look closely at his discourse as a whole, there is an almost obsessive return to the real-versus-ideal schema. Both this preoccupation and its conflict with his own stated goal of examining art within its “historical relations” show important inconsistencies, pointing toward a rather different reading of Jarves’s theory.10
At the superficial level of Jarves’s modern role in the historiography, there are at least two assumptions that bear reconsideration right away. First, there is the supposition of novelty—that Jarves’s ideas noted above were, if not entirely unique, at least unfamiliar to his American audience. Yet Jarves’s fundamental understanding of art and its history was largely conventional and also relied on the real/ideal structure of aesthetic classification that had long been central to American art criticism. And his call for Americans to look abroad for artistic models perhaps ought to be distinguished for its tone and motivation rather than for its uniqueness.
The second assumption is related: that is, the implicit
