Painting (1861).11 The former consists mainly of the paraphrased positions of then-celebrated authorities, extracted and disordered into a clumsily written manuscript. The latter was written as a primer meant to guide American audiences through (his notion of) the history and principles of Italian art, just as his own collection of European pictures was about to make its U.S. debut in New York City.12 It was dedicated to discussing the development of Italian art from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, based on the “evolution” demonstrated by his collection.13 Both texts are superficially unlike The Art-Idea, whose more sophisticated and assured arguments demonstrate a stylistic facility that was absent in the earlier works. Both can also be seen in direct relationship to Jarves’s ambitions for his private collection; they construct the rationale that would prove the pictures’ merits. It is therefore reasonable that these earlier writings have received less attention in the literature on Jarves’s contributions to American art criticism. Unlike the later Art-Idea, with its broader scope and more polished style, these earlier books might be construed as representing the immature and underdeveloped phase of Jarves’s career. Or, as works devoted primarily to European art and its prospects in the United States, they might simply appear irrelevant. The earlier texts nonetheless ought to be reinserted into Jarves’s legacy. As will be discussed, these publications (particularly Art-Hints) do not differ from the later book with regard to the author’s fundamental aesthetic schema and the rhetorical role it served for his American readers. Indeed, the less facile nature of the earlier writing helps demonstrate or clarify the structure Jarves employed for objectifying his opinions—a structure used more subtly, but substantially unchanged, in 1864.
Jarves’s art collection, as noted, was very central to these writing projects. The collection has been highly esteemed since the early twentieth century and viewed as an indication of the collector’s advanced taste. It consists primarily of Italian paintings from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries that Jarves acquired in Italy during the decade of the 1850s while living in Florence. The imagery was neither familiar nor readily legible to his untraveled compatriots. While the paintings may have been to Jarves’s taste, it is evident from even a small sample of his private correspondence that he amassed these particular works out of desires that were socioeconomic as well as aesthetic.14 He purchased what he could afford—works that were then readily available.15 Struggling constantly with inadequate funds, Jarves wrote to supplement both his income and the value of his economical selections.
The collection was first shown in the United States in 1861, and while it has rightly come to be valued, its foreignness to mid-nineteenth-century Americans, with regard to the styles and techniques it represented, failed entirely to impress East Coast audiences. As is clear from Jarves’s inability to sell the paintings in Boston, New York, and Washington, as well as the negative press surrounding their exhibition, the apparent strangeness of the paintings served only to reinforce a type of nativism and feed a suspicion toward their owner and apologist.16 Part of what Jarves’s texts express is a desire to counteract this reception.
The methodological principles that structure Jarves’s arguments, primarily in The Art-Idea of 1864 but also in his Art-Hints of 1855, have a direct relationship to the aesthetic preferences he hoped to foster among Americans—about European as well as American art. These principles take shape in the two fundamental structural forms noted already. First, there is Jarves’s ostensibly overarching theory that art must be understood within its larger social milieu, inside its context of cultural factors. Jarves himself asserted that such an idea structured his approach to art criticism and cited it as his particular contribution to the field. Second, within this larger framework, we can find Jarves recurring to the same rhetorical device time and again in his writing. Specifically, he utilized the binary structure of idealism versus realism, or spirituality versus materiality, as a formula for identifying and defining art. This paradigm for art writing pervaded the discourse and was crucial to the definitions and expectations Jarves and his peers had for art, forming an important basis for their critical opinions. Jarves’s opinions about art and his use of this familiar model were novel to the degree that, at this specific historical moment, the terms of the discourse were becoming more pronounced, pressured, and debated. Thus, he is in step with his contemporaries, but his strident language may indicate that a private agenda—to rationalize and elevate the aesthetic type represented by the paintings in his own collection—animated his writing as much as the debates of the others. In fact, I will question in what follows whether this classificatory model was not even more fundamental to his thinking than his self-styled interest in “social relations.”17
Looking first at the larger cultural foundation that Jarves considered basic to the understanding of art, we can find several key ideas introduced toward the end of his first chapter devoted to specific American artists in The Art-Idea. Many of them correspond to the terms and general ideas seen above. The chapter is entitled “Painting and the Early Painters of America.—Benjamin West; Copley; Leslie; Trumbull; Sully; Peale, Stuart; Mount; Vanderlyn; Cole; Washington Allston.” In the concluding paragraph, Jarves sought to establish the grounds for commenting on contemporary American art in the chapter to follow. He counseled his audience,
We shall turn in the next chapter to the more copious topic of contemporary art, first asking the reader to keep in mind the high qualities of the artists we now take leave of. Note well their gentlemanly repose, quiet dignity, idealization, appreciation of thought and study, and absence in general of the sensational, exaggerated, vulgar, and superficial. They had qualities which ought to have endeared their style to us and made it take root and grow. But there were powerful causes of a political nature at work to strangle its life in its youth. It is gratifying to know that the American school of painting began its career with refined feeling and taste and an elevated ambition, basing its claims to success upon high aims in portraiture and historical and imaginative art. It evinced not much love for genre or common subjects, and indulged in landscape only in an ideal sense. This was indeed a lofty inauguration of the art-element, and, considering the limited number of artists and inauspicious condition of the country, one fruitful in fine art. Under similar circumstances no other people can show a better record, certainly not a brighter beginning. Why it failed of making a permanent impression will appear as we go on. (175)
Again Jarves’s preference is evident: a certain manner of art was far more commendable than the form that was to follow it. He does not name or give precise outlines to the artistic form he extols, but the reader is expected to agree with Jarves on the basis of the values listed. A quality that he variously names “idealization,” “thought and study,” “refined feeling,” and “elevated ambition” is invoked repeatedly as the great merit of the early painters. It is opposed just as clearly to what he denominates “sensational, exaggerated, vulgar, and superficial.” He also favors “historical and imaginative art” and even portraiture, which were undertaken with “high aims.” By contrast, he classes genre paintings as “common” and puts landscape painting in this same sentence, as a thing to be “indulged in” and then only in its “ideal sense.”
Note here his preferred terms. They are ambiguously or interchangeably references both to a pictorial form and to social class and character. “Gentlemanly repose” and “quiet dignity” describe the status of the men as well as their pictures. So too does Jarves’s use of “idealization” and “absence in general of the sensational, exaggerated” refer to and conflate the characteristics of art and artist. The same goes for the obviously disparaged characteristics of the “vulgar” and “superficial,” which are also (but as yet elusively) tied to their “causes of a political nature.” In short, for Jarves, the art and its form are bound to the larger conditions of art’s producers.
Jarves, however, related art to particular aspects of its milieu; a few factors only constituted the pertinent influences for him. Thus, he tells his readers in The Art-Idea repeatedly and in various contexts that the art of any period will respond to the prevailing religious authority and manner of political organization. A very overt and condensed statement of this principle opens his introductory chapter on
