will also suggest that “past” and “present” are likewise taken by modern art histories to mark time consistently, as if they always signify in the same manner.
The other prefiguring assumption is closely related: art is a representation with a primarily textual/discursive referent that is the historical one. In other words, art’s historicity is not primarily pictorial or formal. Perhaps this might be characterized as an American version of the age-old tension between words and images, which the concluding section of chapter 3 will ultimately identify as a fundamental privileging of the former over the latter, a kind of mistrust of images or pictorial form to signify history or to have historical meaning on their own.15
Let us now turn to the individual chapters to further refine the ideas at hand. Each contributes a piece to the overall argument, but each is also an essay, an attempt to rethink the writing of these three critics by rereading their words within the larger patterns and tropes in the critical rhetoric that emerge from their fully examined oeuvre. Unavoidably, there is a certain repetition of the key terms, but the ideas they are employed to illuminate differ or grow as the chapters unfold. It is not the same story being told and retold with the words of three different critics.
Chapter 1 proposes to reread the art theory of James Jackson Jarves, focusing on his often cited 1864 book The Art-Idea. The book and the author have a high profi le in the historiography of American art, and Jarves is an important character in the narrative of a progressive development from objective or putatively factual imagery to the more subjective and expressive mode. Jarves’s art writing forms one of the two principal pillars of his present reputation and is the primary concern of the chapter. While not cited at length in recent American art histories, Jarves is invoked frequently as an authority whose words are used to represent our post–Civil War shifts toward international aesthetic trends, toward the ideal in art, toward the rejection of verisimilitude and anecdote.16 The fact of reference itself, the idea that a quotation bearing Jarves’s name will carry weight, suggests that authority is believed to reside therein. And, indeed, Jarves worked hard to cultivate such a persona, as his writing will demonstrate. Dogmatic insistence characterizes his style, meant in part to show that the principles he espoused could be found over and over again in the history of art. “True” art, he repeated tirelessly, expresses an ideal or spiritual conception, not a material one, and such a conception can be shown to bear a relationship to certain sociocultural characteristics. Jarves so thoroughly hammered at his pet concepts that a sense of conviction asserts itself. That conviction, or rather the assertion, speaks of his desire for authority. In fact, Jarves’s career as a writer has a close relationship to his aspirations to be a cultivated gentleman connoisseur, to figure in elite artistic (largely expatriate) circles.
Extensive biographical information and epistolary evidence from Jarves’s life are presented in Francis Steegmuller’s fine biography The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves, John Simoni’s indispensable study of nineteenth-century art critics and criticism, and Theodore Sizer’s early recontructions of Jarves’s life.17 Raised in Boston and on Cape Cod, Jarves attended school until the age of fifteen. He lacked all further formal education, supposedly due to ill health and poor eyesight. It was a deficiency he felt strongly, having desired to attend Harvard College and to pursue a career as a historian or even as a doctor.18 Falling short of these intellectual aspirations, Jarves spent his life trying to cultivate a learned career and image for himself; significantly, he did so in those fields that he felt were, with less study, open to him. His immediate substitute was travel and travel writing, first in California and then in the Hawaiian Islands, where he also took up newspaper editing. By 1848, Jarves was settled more or less indefinitely in Florence and there began his career in art collecting and art writing.
Jarves was determined (or perhaps obsessed) to possess an art collection and desirous of satisfying (or perhaps demonstrating) a sensibility too refined for the mercantile character of the United States and of his father’s glassmaking business. He was the son of an affluent New England manufacturer,19 but he seems to have wanted to be a young aristocrat whose fortune and taste permitted him an art collection and who did not need to work for his living. While his motives for collecting art are not my concern, it is the case that his actual means were not those of a collector and his writing activity helped bridge the gap, not just in his finances but also in his lack of historical and philosophical study. We will get back to this idea; here a note on his collection is useful.
His collection of early Italian art, owned by Yale University since 1871, constitutes the other pillar of his present reputation. It is thought to represent the precocious taste of a collector who saw value in works that his compatriots were still too provincial to appreciate. Consisting largely of thirteenth-to fifteenth-century religious panel paintings purchased in Italy in the 1850s, many of the images do not employ linear perspective and are populated with stiff and hieratic figures. The coloring, at the time of Jarves’s purchase, was frequently incomprehensible for its darkness and/or the visible green underpainting. The collection thus comes to represent the sophisticated eye of a connoisseur, a collector able to see value in pre-Renaissance forms during a moment when the contemporary American art scene (however imbued it may have been with the writing of Ruskin) was steeped in the dramatic tableaux of Leutze and Bierstadt, the meticulous detail of Church (and the Pre-Raphaelites), and the stagey domesticity of the postbellum genre painters.20
In short, Jarves’s reputation is derived from both his collection and his writing. The chapter will suggest that the art theory expounded in his texts was fundamentally related to Jarves’s financial and critical goals for his collection, yet the focus of the chapter is the definitions for art and the aesthetic positions that Jarves enunciated and for which he is frequently cited. In other words, I am concerned with interpreting Jarves’s meaning by way of his texts. So the characteristics of the man or the motivations that drove him, which may surface, will arise from his style and from the relationship between his stated priorities and the actual structure of his rhetorical forms.
Concentrating on Jarves’s best-selling and most frequently cited book, The Art-Idea, published in 1864, the chapter proposes to identify and analyze the methodological principles Jarves employed and the primary rhetorical structures that shape his theory. Important among the latter are our poles of the real and ideal. Yet Jarves’s method is also intentionally historicist; he sought to create an objective classificatory scheme based on the idea that art should be understood in its “historical relations.” Thus, while he repeatedly classified art under the categories of the real and ideal, he sought to bind his categories to ostensible historical conditions. He thereby constructed a rationale that validated his aesthetic preferences—as if they carried the status of factual knowledge, like a science of sorts. The real and ideal—or Jarves’s preferred equivalents, the material and spiritual—become terms of evaluation that are represented as objective classifications. With this system, the relative worth of realist versus idealist art was identifiable or even quantifiable not only because it was bound to ostensibly factual cultural characteristics (as opposed to aesthetic opinion), but because it could also be affirmed by historical example.
Comparing key aspects of this text with his earlier Art-Hints, published in 1855, the chapter argues that Jarves’s most essential project was not, in fact, that of demonstrating “the historical relations” of art, as he claimed. His founding interest was instead to secure the classificatory schema that would prove the superiority of the art he championed and simultaneously demonstrate that certain facts of American society actively worked against this correct understanding of art. While Art-Hints receives less attention in the historiography (understandably since it gives very scant attention to American art), it appears here because the juxtaposition with his apparently more sophisticated Art-Idea highlights the author’s obsessive attachment to his pet ideas, regardless of the theme he claimed to be addressing. The significant difference between the two texts is their level of fluency. The earlier and clumsier manuscript exposes more overtly the actual priority behind the rhetoric that persists throughout all his writing. We are thereby enabled to read in both texts an underlying desire to build a system that would authorize his judgment and instill the aesthetic preferences