Critical Shift. Karen L. Georgi

of his economical selections.

      The collection was first shown in the United States in 1861, and while it has rightly come to be valued, its foreignness to mid-nineteenth-century Americans, with regard to the styles and techniques it represented, failed entirely to impress East Coast audiences. As is clear from Jarves’s inability to sell the paintings in Boston, New York, and Washington, as well as the negative press surrounding their exhibition, the apparent strangeness of the paintings served only to reinforce a type of nativism and feed a suspicion toward their owner and apologist.¹⁶ Part of what Jarves’s texts express is a desire to counteract this reception.

      The methodological principles that structure Jarves’s arguments, primarily in The Art-Idea of 1864 but also in his Art-Hints of 1855, have a direct relationship to the aesthetic preferences he hoped to foster among Americans—about European as well as American art. These principles take shape in the two fundamental structural forms noted already. First, there is Jarves’s ostensibly overarching theory that art must be understood within its larger social milieu, inside its context of cultural factors. Jarves himself asserted that such an idea structured his approach to art criticism and cited it as his particular contribution to the field. Second, within this larger framework, we can find Jarves recurring to the same rhetorical device time and again in his writing. Specifically, he utilized the binary structure of idealism versus realism, or spirituality versus materiality, as a formula for identifying and defining art. This paradigm for art writing pervaded the discourse and was crucial to the definitions and expectations Jarves and his peers had for art, forming an important basis for their critical opinions. Jarves’s opinions about art and his use of this familiar model were novel to the degree that, at this specific historical moment, the terms of the discourse were becoming more pronounced, pressured, and debated. Thus, he is in step with his contemporaries, but his strident language may indicate that a private agenda—to rationalize and elevate the aesthetic type represented by the paintings in his own collection—animated his writing as much as the debates of the others. In fact, I will question in what follows whether this classificatory model was not even more fundamental to his thinking than his self-styled interest in “social relations.”¹⁷

      Looking first at the larger cultural foundation that Jarves considered basic to the understanding of art, we can find several key ideas introduced toward the end of his first chapter devoted to specific American artists in The Art-Idea. Many of them correspond to the terms and general ideas seen above. The chapter is entitled “Painting and the Early Painters of America.—Benjamin West; Copley; Leslie; Trumbull; Sully; Peale, Stuart; Mount; Vanderlyn; Cole; Washington Allston.” In the concluding paragraph, Jarves sought to establish the grounds for commenting on contemporary American art in the chapter to follow. He counseled his audience,

      We shall turn in the next chapter to the more copious topic of contemporary art, first asking the reader to keep in mind the high qualities of the artists we now take leave of. Note well their gentlemanly repose, quiet dignity, idealization, appreciation of thought and study, and absence in general of the sensational, exaggerated, vulgar, and superficial. They had qualities which ought to have endeared their style to us and made it take root and grow. But there were powerful causes of a political nature at work to strangle its life in its youth. It is gratifying to know that the American school of painting began its career with refined feeling and taste and an elevated ambition, basing its claims to success upon high aims in portraiture and historical and imaginative art. It evinced not much love for genre or common subjects, and indulged in landscape only in an ideal sense. This was indeed a lofty inauguration of the art-element, and, considering the limited number of artists and inauspicious condition of the country, one fruitful in fine art. Under similar circumstances no other people can show a better record, certainly not a brighter beginning. Why it failed of making a permanent impression will appear as we go on. (175)

      Again Jarves’s preference is evident: a certain manner of art was far more commendable than the form that was to follow it. He does not name or give precise outlines to the artistic form he extols, but the reader is expected to agree with Jarves on the basis of the values listed. A quality that he variously names “idealization,” “thought and study,” “refined feeling,” and “elevated ambition” is invoked repeatedly as the great merit of the early painters. It is opposed just as clearly to what he denominates “sensational, exaggerated, vulgar, and superficial.” He also favors “historical and imaginative art” and even portraiture, which were undertaken with “high aims.” By contrast, he classes genre paintings as “common” and puts landscape painting in this same sentence, as a thing to be “indulged in” and then only in its “ideal sense.”

      Note here his preferred terms. They are ambiguously or interchangeably references both to a pictorial form and to social class and character. “Gentlemanly repose” and “quiet dignity” describe the status of the men as well as their pictures. So too does Jarves’s use of “idealization” and “absence in general of the sensational, exaggerated” refer to and conflate the characteristics of art and artist. The same goes for the obviously disparaged characteristics of the “vulgar” and “superficial,” which are also (but as yet elusively) tied to their “causes of a political nature.” In short, for Jarves, the art and its form are bound to the larger conditions of art’s producers.

      Jarves, however, related art to particular aspects of its milieu; a few factors only constituted the pertinent influences for him. Thus, he tells his readers in The Art-Idea repeatedly and in various contexts that the art of any period will respond to the prevailing religious authority and manner of political organization. A very overt and condensed statement of this principle opens his introductory chapter on American art. The chapter consists of his general meditations on the subject. The title alone alerts us to his concerns: “An Inquiry into the Art-Conditions and Prospects of America.—Art-Criticism.—Press, People, and Clergy.—Needs of Artists and Public.—American Knownothingism in Art.—Eclecticism.—The True Path.” The chapter begins with the following summary:

      We have now succinctly traced the art-idea in its historical progress and aesthetic development in the civilizations of the Old World to the period of its advent in the New, showing, as we proceeded, that, though the love of beauty is a fundamental quality of the human mind, yet its manifestations in the form of art are checked, stimulated, or modified by the influences of climate, habits, and traditions of race, relative pressure of utilitarian or aesthetic ideas, the character of creeds and tone of religious feeling, and above all by the opposite degrees of freedom of choice and qualities of inspiration permitted to the artist by Pagan, Papal, and Protestant governments. (148)

      Jarves’s idea of historical progress apparently eschews the idea of a single linear tradition in art history. He attributed to art changeable and historically determined stylistic traits, endemic to particular places and peoples. Each culture has its own habits, traditions, “tone of religious feeling,” or relative utilitarianism, and this determines the nature of the art it produces. He thus constructed a historicist art history, a notion of art as bound to relative conditions prevailing in a given culture. Such notions of history and art were indeed common at the time, though Jarves repeatedly claimed that this was the novel contribution that set his book apart.¹⁸ One important and widely read exponent of the historicist approach to art was the French thinker Hippolyte Taine, whose philosophy was translated into English by John Durand in 1864 as Philosophy of Art. Jarves would have heard its echoes, even if he did not read it himself—which he must have done at least by 1875, when he wrote briefly about it.¹⁹

      To refine his approach a bit further, Jarves relied on an idea of absolute truth with universal quests for beauty, and of fixed poles of spirit and matter between which such beauty is expressed. But the nearness to one or the other of these poles is relative, based on the varying cultural characteristics. Jarves’s overall approach to art criticism thus gave structure to the criteria he used for evaluating American art, and it systematized his judgments and opinions about it. Though his approach consisted of an assertion that art was fundamentally an expression of the indigenous conditions particular to a time and place, he routinely emphasized that art responded “above all” to “the opposite degrees of freedom of choice and qualities of inspiration permitted to the artist by Pagan, Papal, and Protestant