¹ For example, see Joshua Taylor, The Fine Arts in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 95–96; David Bjelajac, American Art: A Cultural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 227–30; Wayne Craven, American Art: History and Culture (Boston: McGraw Hill, 1994), 329–36. Craven exemplifies the periodization and transition mentality that I refer to, but he does not name Jarves specifically, favoring instead the invocation of more popularly know writers like Henry James. For Jarves's role in the demise of the so-called Hudson River school see, for example, Linda Ferber, “Albert Bierstadt: The History of a Reputation,” in Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, eds., Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 27–30; Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1988), 126. Barbara Novak, from a slightly different perspective, calls Jarves “the only important critic [of that time] who was not beguiled by the rhetoric of the operatic landscapes.” See Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press), 1980, 31.

² The book also sold well, going, according to Jarves's biographer Francis Steegmuller, “to at least four American editions, of which the fourth bears the date 1877.” Steegmuller, The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), 217.

³ In addition to numerous articles, published over decades, drawn from his Hawaiian experiences and European travel, Jarves published at least six essays between 1860 and 1864, when The Art-Idea came out. These articles are largely extracts from that text and from Art Studies of 1861. For instance, two articles published in the Christian Examiner, March and July 1862 respectively, contain long passages that reappear in the Art-Idea. In the March essay, “Can We Have an Art-Gallery?”, pages 207–11 become pages 263–66 in The Art-Idea, with some interesting changes. A few, generally more critical, sentences are removed, and some European gallery statistics seem to be padded a bit in the book. In the July article, “The Art of America and the ‘Old Masters’,” pages 73–81 correspond without alteration to pages 156–64 in The Art-Idea. For a more complete list of Jarves's published articles see Steegmuller, 310–12. I would also note, with regard to modern inattention to Art-Hints, that Roger Stein is an important exception, offering one of the few lengthy discussions of that text. Correspondingly Stein also does not exaggerate Jarves's role, noting that the book was neither original nor well received. See Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 124–46.

⁴ Steegmuller, 187, quotes Jarves from a letter to Charles Eliot Norton in which Jarves stated that “the Gallery without the book or the book without the Gallery in America would be failures.”

⁵ In each city, beginning with Boston in 1859, he proposed that his paintings, taken as a lot, might form the nucleus of a public museum. He claimed that he preferred to sell the pictures together in order to preserve the historical sequence they demonstrated. For a complete narrative of the failed attempts, ending with the sale of the pictures by auction to Yale College in 1871, see Steegmuller, 164–265. Steegmuller includes extensive documentation from Jarves's private correspondence and public reviews, all of which indicate the difficulties, disfavor, and distrust that followed Jarves's enterprise. See also “Private View at the Institute of Fine Arts,” New-York Daily Tribune, 20 Nov. 1860, 5; and “Opening of the Institute of Fine Arts,” New-York Times, 20 Nov. 1864, 4.

⁶ In 1855, in the preface to Art-Hints, Jarves claimed that his contribution was to write a book “in a popular form” that put the “abstract principles and rules of Art” together with “an outline of its historic progress and social relations.” The “facts and ideas” themselves, he acknowledged, were already known and discussed by John Ruskin, Francis Rio, Lord Lindsay, and Anna Jameson. Jarves, Art-Hints: Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855), vii. Though it is his stated objective, in this text he does not actually manage anything so systematic. But in 1864 the objective is restated repeatedly and there he does, in fact, execute it, as will be discussed.

⁷ Jarves, The Art-Idea, ed. Benjamin Rowland, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 175. This is the available and authoritative edition; page numbers from this edition will be used.

⁸ In Barbara Novak's American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York: Praeger, 1969) these categorizations are fundamental to her study, as the subtitle suggests. The premise is that there were relatively fixed styles that exemplified either the ideal or the real, and that each carried with it a more or less definite meaning (and relation to “Americanness”). I strongly agree with the centrality of the terms, but find that their role in the rhetoric of criticism is less about actual fixed styles or even concepts, and more about criticism itself – about the positioning and evaluation of a given work, and of a given critic's ideology.

⁹ The Art-Idea, 148.

¹⁰ For a good introduction to these philosophies and their relation to art history see Eric Fernie, ed., Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology (London: Phaidon, 1995).

¹¹ Strident anti-Catholic positions were common at this time. Charles Eliot Norton, future supporter of Jarves's bid to sell his collection in Boston, routinely exhibited this bias.

¹² The Art-Idea, 135, 137.

¹³ Ibid., 161.

¹⁴ Ibid., 163.

¹⁵ Emanuel Leutze (1816–68) was born in Germany and raised the US. He returned to Germany in 1841 to study at the Düsseldorf academy, afterward living in both the US and Germany. His large-scale history paintings that dramatized events from US history were very popular with his American audiences.

¹⁶ The Art-Idea, 177–78.

¹⁷ Ibid., 150.

¹⁸ In fact, in his introduction to The Art-Idea, instead of introducing the topic of the book, Jarves recounted – in the character of a patient martyr – his struggles with his collection and the public's misunderstanding of it. Indeed it seems that for him this was the topic. His reasons for writing the book are inextricable, by his own acknowledgment, from his trouble in America vis-à-vis his collection. “I have been under no illusion as to popular sympathy,” he stated. “No one more practically knows the obstacles to be removed before the goal is reached.” The Art-Idea, 12 (my italics).

¹⁹ Art-Hints, 8.

²⁰ Ibid., 43.

²¹ Ibid., 43.

²² Ibid., 45.

²³ Ibid., 43–44.

²⁴ The Art-Idea, 156.

²⁵ Henry Ward Beecher quoted without citation in The Art-Idea, 156 (original emphasis).

²⁶ The Art-Idea, 157.

²⁷ Art-Hints, 310 (my emphasis).

²⁸ The Art-Idea, 149.

²⁹ Ibid., 166.