John Wesley Jarvis
John Wesley Jarvis
1780 - 1840
American painter of English birth. He grew up in Philadelphia, PA, where he knew many of the city’s resident artists and was apprenticed to Edward Savage, whom he remembered as an ‘ignorant beast … not qualified to teach me any art but that of deception’ (Bolton and Groce, pp. 299–300). Jarvis cultivated a formidable natural artistic talent through his own efforts. By 1802 he was established in New York as an engraver and very soon thereafter formed a profitable portrait business with Joseph Wood (c. 1778–1830). In 1807 he opened his own studio and from then on was a proficient and celebrated society painter, numbering many statesmen and such writers as Washington Irving among his patrons.
As Jarvis was essentially self-taught, his work lacks a certain grace and finesse, and his style is more vigorous than refined. Yet his finest works are visually lively, and his acutely objective approach reveals much of the sitter’s temperament and personality. In his full-length portrait of Daniel D. Tompkins (New York, NY Hist. Soc.) the beautifully painted figure and dramatic sky suggest the authority and energy that Tompkins brought to his political career. Many of Jarvis’s portraits capture a spirit of national pride and optimism characteristic of this period of American history; that of Samuel Chester Reid (1815; Minneapolis, MN, Inst. A.) shows a hero of the War of 1812, poised on the deck of his ship engaged in battle, as an embodiment of courage and command. Jarvis’s only known sculpture, a plaster bust of Thomas Paine (New York, NY Hist. Soc.), is naturalistically and dramatically modelled.
Jarvis’s considerable artistic and social skills made him the most sought after and wealthiest portrait painter in America during the first quarter of the 19th century. Besides working in his New York studio, where John Quidor and Henry Inman were among his apprentices, he made frequent painting excursions to Boston, MA, Baltimore, MD, Washington, DC, New Orleans, LA, and elsewhere. He exhibited in New York at the National Academy of Design and regularly at the American Academy of Fine Arts (1816–33). Having had an undisciplined lifestyle and having suffered a stroke in 1834, he died in penury. [John Driscoll. "Jarvis, John Wesley." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T044460.]
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