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REREADING 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 dismissal of Jarves’s earlier published art books, Art-Hints (1855) and Art Studies: The “Old Masters” of Italy; 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 American art. The chapter consists of his general meditations on the subject. The title alone alerts us to his concerns: “An Inquiry into the Art-Conditions and Prospects of America.—Art-Criticism.—Press, People, and Clergy.—Needs of Artists and Public.—American Knownothingism in Art.—Eclecticism.—The True Path.” The chapter begins with the following summary:

We have now succinctly traced the art-idea in its historical progress and aesthetic development in the civilizations of the Old World to the period of its advent in the New, showing, as we proceeded, that, though the love of beauty is a fundamental quality of the human mind, yet its manifestations in the form of art are checked, stimulated, or modified by the influences of climate, habits, and traditions of race, relative pressure of utilitarian or aesthetic ideas, the character of creeds and tone of religious feeling, and above all by the opposite degrees of freedom of choice and qualities of inspiration permitted to the artist by Pagan, Papal, and Protestant governments. (148)

Jarves’s idea of historical progress apparently eschews the idea of a single linear tradition in art history. He attributed to art changeable and historically determined stylistic traits, endemic to particular places and peoples. Each culture has its own habits, traditions, “tone of religious feeling,” or relative utilitarianism, and this determines the nature of the art it produces. He thus constructed a historicist art history, a notion of art as bound to relative conditions prevailing in a given culture. Such notions of history and art were indeed common at the time, though Jarves repeatedly claimed that this was the novel contribution that set his book apart.¹⁸ One important and widely read exponent of the historicist approach to art was the French thinker Hippolyte Taine, whose philosophy was translated into English by John Durand in 1864 as Philosophy of Art. Jarves would have heard its echoes, even if he did not read it himself—which he must have done at least by 1875, when he wrote briefly about it.¹⁹

To refine his approach a bit further, Jarves relied on an idea of absolute truth with universal quests for beauty, and of fixed poles of spirit and matter between which such beauty is expressed. But the nearness to one or the other of these poles is relative, based on the varying cultural characteristics. Jarves’s overall approach to art criticism thus gave structure to the criteria he used for evaluating American art, and it systematized his judgments and opinions about it. Though his approach consisted of an assertion that art was fundamentally an expression of the indigenous conditions particular to a time and place, he routinely emphasized that art responded “above all” to “the opposite degrees of freedom of choice and qualities of inspiration permitted to the artist by Pagan, Papal, and Protestant governments.” For Jarves, the prevailing religion established the aesthetic tone and expressive intent of any epoch’s artwork. Government itself, as he implied here with the formula “Pagan, Papal, and Protestant governments,” is likewise central, but it is hardly distinct from (literally modified by) these broad religious types. To this basic armature are added corresponding attitudes and tastes of the people in given times and places.

These ideas, too, are rather broad and reductive and conform to then-prevalent notions of types.²⁰ In particular, Jarves repeatedly linked sensual excess and despotism to papal religion and rule, while crediting the Catholic countries where such rule dominated—and he referred predominantly to Italy and Spain—with a true passion for art and beauty. Correspondingly, he summarized Protestant people and art as possessing an inherent distaste for all that is not democratic. Such people, however, were hampered by an overly pragmatic and abstemious attitude toward art, with a preference for the mundane in content and form. Here is one example of many:

Catholicism, first in its ignorance, and afterward by selfish policy, aimed at its restriction to a defined, dogmatic, religious expression. But while itself under the impetus of growth and expansion, its art partook of the same partial freedom and noble energy, and to the extent of its liberty strove to be true and spiritual. Unfortunately for its final perfection in this direction, that art, whose varied progress and lofty genius were represented by Giotto, Niccola Pisano, Orgagna … , was degraded into an instrument of state pomp and aristocratic luxury. (135)

By contrast,

as soon as Protestant art freed itself from the control of rulers sensual and papal at heart, like the English Stuarts, it identified itself by degrees with the people, assuming their level of thought, and their liking for the homely and common. …Aesthetic feeling [does not] assume the dignity of a passion. …Yet it is slowly making its way to the heart of the multitude … without any need of church or state to interpret or dictate. Catholicism exalted the art-motive, but Protestantism gave it liberty. (137)

Jarves has thus also borrowed heavily from Ruskinian notions of periodizing and classifying Italian art. This is not our main concern, however. Rather, Jarves coupled Catholicism and Protestantism with respective tendencies in aesthetic taste and disparate levels of popular will—qualities, it ought to be stressed, that he discusses as inevitably or automatically bound to each other, to the exclusion of myriad others that might equally be used to explain or define a religion’s (or an aesthetic’s) constellation of attitudes, characteristics, and manifestations. Catholicism is linked with “selfish policy” and dogma, under which art was eventually “degraded into an instrument of state pomp and aristocratic luxury.” Its moment of being “true and spiritual” coincided with a brief time of “partial freedom.” On the other hand, liberty is the great contribution of Protestantism. Its art, while “homely and common,” has “freed itself,” and it communicates without “church or state to interpret or dictate.”

However loose, generic, and current his links may have been, they represent a desire to explain artistic differences by means of cultural factors. Or, were these supposed cultural influences a set of predetermined ideas that Jarves sought to solidify with the putative objectivity of his historicist method? In particular, we should wonder whether his oppositions between generalized religious and political structures, so rigidly reduced and systematized, were employed foremost as value-laden types meant to classify aesthetic form. This question might alternately be posed as which of these came first: Did his aesthetic opinions follow from the conclusions of his theory of cultural influence, or did this theory rationalize his preformed artistic judgments? I suggest that the latter might be the more accurate reading. Indeed, it seems that his historicist method rationalized both the predetermined ideas about political and religious systems and even more fundamentally the formal types he sought to associate with them.

Here the other essential element of Jarves’s art theory, the classificatory scheme of the real versus the ideal, becomes integral. This structure forms Jarves’s bridge between broad cultural character and individual formal assessments and provides him with ostensibly objective grounds on which to criticize American art and American taste. It is perhaps closest to his actual agenda, to the primary set of opinions that he sought to propagate and justify and to which the rest of his historicist approach was subsequently adapted. The following is a very representative instance of this method of classification. It also demonstrates those opinions that the structure helped stabilize as the most salient for the evaluation of art. In the chapter “Art-Conditions and Prospects of America,” Jarves directs his readers by stating, “Certain works of man are a perpetual joy,—the same yesterday, to-day, and forever,—because they are a revelation from the unseen, and an assertion of the eternal supremacy of spirit over matter. Genius creates, talent constructs. The power of the one is instinctive, a gift from above; of the other, receptive, accumulating by example and training. Hence genius alone gives birth to great, new, or noble work; while simple talent, however clever in execution, often fails from want of intuitive discernment and original thought” (161).