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A Critical Medium: James Jackson Jarves's Vision of Art History

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, James Jackson Jarves (1818-1888) emerged as one of the most conspicuous figures in the American art world. His prominence was due to three principal activities: he wrote intelligently about contemporary art; he inaugurated the systematic study of art history in the United States; and, finally, he pioneered the collecting of Italian Old Master paintings in this country. These accomplishments are usually viewed in recent literature asthe consequence of his debt to European criticism and especially the ideas propounded by John Ruskin.1 While this approach has yielded productive insights, it fails to address the deeper question of motivation: what in Jarves's personal and philosophical outlook, for example, inclined him to favor the revaluation of Italian art then taking place? And, on the other hand, why did he occasionally disagree with Ruskin on such important matters a the relative merits of PreRaphaelitism? These and similar issues are best examined in light of Jarves's own epistemological formulations. Hewas hardly reticent to express his thoughts on the subject, and a review of them reveals that spiritualism, the novel religion that swept hrough the nation at mid-century, served as the foundation of his beliefs. In general, when scholars have discussed Jarves's faith, they have treated it as tangential to his other pursuits. By granting spiritualism its due, by contending, as is the intent of this article, that it was crucial to his evaluative process, we can delineate his aesthetic agenda more comprehensively and place him more effectively within the intellectual and social context of his times. The son of a prosperous glass manufacturer, Jarves grew up surrounded by material comfort in Boston. His youth was occupied by a series of ventures, including a prolonged stay in Hawaii, that never provided the anticipated financial rewards. In 1851 he booked passage to Europe and there, surrounded by the treasures of Paris, experienced the first stirrings of his love of art. This passion was consummated a year later in Florence when, with the financial assistance of his father, he began acquiring the late medieval and Renaissance paintings he hoped would form the basis for a gallery in America. In addition to collecting, Jarves managed to earn a reputation as a writer of books on travel and art. The Tuscan city remained his center of operations for the remainder of his days, though he visited the United States frequently in the years shortly before the Civil War in an attempt to find a city willing to acquire his collection. The attempt failed to meet his expectations; in 1867,