THE TWO LIVES OF JAMES JACKSON JARVES,

The Biography of a Yankee - East vs. West - Philosophy, Literary History, and Engineering

by Francis Steegmuller '27, NewHaven, Yale University Press, 1951, 331 pp.

Here is a fascinating and instructive biography of a Yankee who, in the normal life span of three score and ten, presents to posterity two astoundingly disparate careers.

First, in the eighteen thirties and forties, he was a wayfarer in Hawaii. Adventurer, trader, friend of the missionaries, editor, historian, and part-time diplomat, he played a colorful role in the Hawaiian-American story, but never a decisive one. His roots did not sink deep, and his personal mission in Hawaii never clarified in his own mind. Thus he was free in eighteen fifty-one, at the age of thirty- three,to sail from Boston for Europe to develop a second career.

This second career began with Jarves' discovery of art, first in the Louvre, and then in the galleries, and palaces, churches, and monasteries of Italy, particularly those of Florence. He became acutely aware that art was cultural history and that a living culture, expressing itself in a living art requires a rich historical background of original works. With this in mind, he bought pictures, up to the limit of his relatively modest means, aiming at a great educational collection, historically arranged, that some day he could present to America for the nourishment of American artists and students. He dedicated himself to this cultural mission and succeeded, in spite of many vicissitudes, both comic and tragic, in getting his collection of Italian Art into an American public institution. To-day, at Yale, the Jarves Collection is a magnificent and priceless possession. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Art at Princeton, has valued it at "two or three stadiums or a dozen or so professorships."

Mr. Steegmuller has written this biography in an easy and natural style, which aids pleasurably in the unfolding of Jarves' story. He succeeds admirably in making the reader appreciate the warm and sensitive personality of this most unusual nineteenth-century American.