James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888) was an American newspaper editor and art critic who is remembered above all as the first American art collector to buy Italian primitives and Old Masters.
Jarves was the editor of an early weekly newspaper in the Hawaiian Islands, The Polynesian (1840–48). During the 1850s, Jarves relocated to Florence, Italy where he served as the U.S. vice-consul and collected art.[1][2] After other American museums refused to buy Jarves' collection, Yale University granted him a loan with the collection as collateral. When Jarves defaulted in 1871, the Yale University Art Gallery purchased 119 Italian paintings, spanning the centuries from the tenth to the seventeenth, for a price of $22,000 or $30,000.[3][4][5] The "Master of the Jarves Cassone", later discovered to be Apollonio di Giovanni di Tomaso, was named after him.[3]
An honorary Hawaiian citizen, Jarves was awarded the order of Kamehameha I for his diplomatic services to Hawaii while empires fought to control it. The king of Italy appointed him Cavaliere della Corona d'Italia for his contribution to Italian art.[6]'
Jarves married Elizabeth Russell Swain in 1838. One year after his first wife's death, Jarves in 1862 married Isabella Kast Heyden who died in 1887. In 1888 Jarves died of jaundice; he is buried on the English Cemetery in Rome.[3]
Jarves and his second wife are, through their daughter Annabel, the great-great grandparents of Lady Elizabeth Marian Frances Kerr. Lady Elizabeth is the wife of Richard Scott, 10th Duke of Buccleuch and mother of the ducal heir. They are also the great-great-great grandparents of Henry Oliver Charles FitzRoy, 12th Duke of Grafton, whose mother is Lady Clare Amabel Margaret Kerr, widow of James FitzRoy, Earl of Euston and the sister of Lady Elizabeth Marian Frances Kerr.
Edith Wharton drew upon Jarves' well-known misfortunes in her novella False Dawn (The Forties).[5]
History of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands: Embracing Their Antiquities, Mythology, Legends, Discovery by Europeans in the Sixteenth Century, Re-Discovery by Cook, with Their Civil, Religious and Political History, from the Earliest Traditionary Period to the Present Time (1843)
Scenes and Scenery in the Sandwich Islands, and a trip through Central America: being observations from my notebooks during the years 1837-1842 (1843)
Parisian Sights and French Principles, Seen Through American Spectacles (1852)
Parisian Sights and French Principles, Seen Through American Spectacles, Second Series (1855)
Art-Hints, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting (1855)
Italian Sights and Papal Principles, Seen Through American Spectacles (1856)
