Jarves, James Jackson, 1818-1888

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. 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. The "Master of the Jarves Cassone", later discovered to be Apollonio di Giovanni di Tomaso, was named after him.

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.

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.

Edith Wharton drew upon Jarves' well-known misfortunes in her novella False Dawn (The Forties).

James Jackson Jarves was born in Boston on August 20, 1818 – not 1820, as usually stated…..He died in Switzerland, at Tarasp in the Engadine, on June 28, 1888, and was buried in the English cemetery at Rome.