Critical Shift: Rereading Jarves, Cook, Stillman, and the Narratives of Nineteenth-Century American Art

Chapter 1: 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 NineteenthCentury 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. 1 rereading james jackson jarves’s ART-IDEA 22 critical shift 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 longstanding 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 rereading james jackson jarves’s ART-IDEA 23 contradict the uses to...