Jarves

appointing from the first. In 1860, ten years
before the incorporation of the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art, New York, and the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, they were exhibited at the
Derby Galleries, 625 Broadway, and again, in
1863, in the rooms of the New York Historical
Society. Jarves himself prepared the catalogue,
fortifying it with a long list of documents from
the chief European and American critics. The
pictures were then removed to Boston, "where
also there was no will to buy them." Some were
"sold to pay expenses of transfers and general
cost of keeping the collection as intact as possi-
ble." He could have sold them piecemeal, but
he "was not disposed to scatter a collection so
valuable in its collective character as an illus-
tration of the development of early Christian art
and a school for the American art student" (New
York Tribune, Nov. 10, 1871). The genuine-
ness of the pictures, too, was "questioned by
critics who had never gone abroad to study such
work." In 1866 "popular indifference, misun-
derstanding, misliking and even hostility" was
such that Jarves contemplated taking his collec-
tion, which he hoped might form "the nucleus of
a Free Gallery in one of our large cities," to
England. After his friend, Charles Eliot Nor-
ton, failed to interest either Boston or Harvard
in the collection, Jarves, who was embarrassed
financially, agreed to deposit his pictures, for a
period of three years as security for a lo^n, in
the newly completed art school building at Yale.
This arrangement, chiefly due to the effort of
Professor John F. Weir and Professor (later
President) Noah Porter, has been described as
"one of the most irregular pieces of University
finance on record and certainly one of the most
brilliant" (Yale Alumni Weekly, May 22, 1914,
p. 965). When in 1871 Jarves was unable to pay
off this mortgage, he permitted the collection of
119 paintings to be sold at auction to the Uni-
versity, which made the only bid. A later col-
lection of early Italian pictures was exhibited in
the Boston Foreign Art Exhibition in 1883-84.
Most of these, fifty-two in all, were sold in 1884
to his friend, Liberty E. Holden of Cleveland,
and were subsequently given to the Cleveland
Museum of Art by Mrs. Holden. Neither the
Yale nor the Cleveland pictures were greatly es-
teemed by the public until some fifty or sixty
years after their purchase by Jarves, fully thirty
years after his death.

In 1881 Jarves gave his collection of Venetian
glass in memory of his father to the Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art, at considerable sacrifice to
himself and to his family, thus practising what
he nad so long preached. He sold his collection

Jarves

of embroideries, laces, costumes, and Renais-
sance fabrics in New York in 1887. These were
shortly afterward acquired for the Farnsworth
Museum at Wellesley College, Mass. Had he
been wealthy he would have become a great
patron of art; as it was he exhausted his entire
fortune. In spite of many disappointments and
vicissitudes, he attained his chief aim—"the dif-
fusion of artistic knowledge and aesthetic taste
in America"—though not until a generation had
passed away. Jarves was married to Elizabeth
Russell Swain at New Bedford, Mass., on Oct.
2,1838, and to Isabel Kast Hayden at Boston on
Apr. 30,1862. He survived them both and four
of his six children. He died in Switzerland at
Tarasp in the Engadine and was buried in the
English Cemetery at Rome. Although a modest,
retiring, and unworldly man, he was decorated
with the Order of Kamehameha I by the King
of Hawaii and was created a Chevalier of the
Order of the Crown of Italy by King Humbert I
in recognition of his work in helping Italian art
and artists. He was also an honorary member of
the Academia delle Belle Arti of Florence, a
corresponding member of the American Oriental
Society, and a patron of the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art.

Jarves was a voluminous writer and his books
contain much of biographical interest. Among
them are: Account of the Visit of the French
Frigate I'Artemise at the Sandwich Islands (Hon-
olulu, 1839, extracted from an article in the
Hawaiian Spectator); History of the Hawaiian
or Sandwich Islands (1843, J&H? and 1847);
Scenes and Scenery in the Sandwich Islands, and
a Trip Through Central America (Boston, 1843,
1844, London, 1844); Scenes and Scenery in
California (1844), a volume written before the
course of conquest by the United States and the
discovery of gold, and having, therefore, a pe-
culiar interest and value; Parisian Sights and
French Principles Seen Through American Spec-
tacles (2 vols., first published anonymously, New
York, 1852, and London, 1853, then in 1855
under the author's name); Art-Hints, Architec-
ture, Sculpture and Painting (1855); Italian
Sights and Papal Principles SeenThrough Amer-
ican Spectacles (1856); Why and What am If
The Confessions of an Inquirer. In three parts,
Part I, Heart-Experience, or the Education of
the Emotions (1857, part III was never pub-
lished) ; Kiana: A Tradition of Hawaii (1837),
a romance; Descriptive Catalogue of "Old Mas-
ters" (1860); Art-Studies; the "Old Masters"
of Italy: Painting (1861) ; The Art Idea, Part
second of Confessions of an Inquirer (1864), re-
printed in 1865 under the title: The Art Idea:

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