Sandwich Glass heir takes different road - James Jarves starts first Hawaiian newspaper, turns art critic, collector When Deming Jarves, founder of the Boston and Sandwich Glass Co., began planning for his succession in the business, he naturally looked to his oldest son, James. But James Jackson Jarves had little interest in the company that was beginning to make its mark on Cape Cod. Born in 1818, James took much more pleasure in reading the classics and in the summer fishing the ponds and lakes near the glass factory. He acted as “the rich squire’s son” and became a collector of native America artifacts. At one point he ran off to live with the Wampanoags. He was 8 years old at the time. As a teenager, James was unfortunately plagued with bad health. Hoping to alleviate the problem with a change of climate, Deming Jarves sent his son to Hawaii to live with friends who had established a commercial enterprise there. Once, in what was then called the Sandwich Islands, at 22 James Jarves started the first newspaper in the island kingdom. Published weekly, the Polynesian was immediately popular. The editorial slant of the newspaper however, occasionally put him at odds with the small group of Americans and Europeans who were vying for power in Hawaii. In 1844 the Polynesian became an official organ of the Hawaiian government and Jarves was named to King Kamehamea III’s advisory council with the title of Director of Government Printing. As sides jockeyed for influence, the king feared that European powers might try to annex the islands. In what would be a future irony, Jarves was sent to Washington in 1848 as a special envoy to negotiate a treaty that made the United States the protector of Hawaiian independence. Having completed that task, Jarves decided not to return to Hawaii. His marriage to Libby Swain of New Bedford had not been a happy one and he set out instead to explore Europe. Leaving his wife and daughter behind, he took his son, Horatio, and moved first to Paris and then in 1852 he settled in Florence, In that storied Italian city, he joined an expatriate community of artists and writers, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning and English art critic John Ruskin. He began writing feature pieces for Harpers Magazine. James Jarves had never been a success in business and had lived mostly on money sent to him by his mother. With the glass business doing well in Sandwich, there was enough to give him a comfortable lifestyle. He promoted himself as a member of the wealthy class and lived accordingly. He began to collect Renaissance art. His focus was on the so-called “primitives” from the period. Over time, his collection included paintings and sketches by Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto and Leonardo da Vinci. Jarves also collected glass and textiles. He was one of the first Americans to support public funding of museums and through his books, Art Hints: Architecture, Sculpture and Painting and Art Studies: The “Old Master” of Italy, he did much to influence 19th century American art taste. Late in his life he became interested in Japanese art, publishing a book on that subject. With the death of his father in 1869 and the subsequent decline of the glass company, Jarves found his ambitious lifestyle largely curtailed. As his financial difficulties multiplied, he was able to sell some of his collection to industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt and some of those pieces ended up in the New York City Museum of Metropolitan Art. At one point, in order to pay his debts, he mortgaged a considerable number of paintings to Yale University. When he was unable to pay the note, the university kept his collection. where it remains on display today. Other works, purchased separately by Ohio real estate magnate Liberty Holden, are now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. When his business partner son mismanaged what was left of the family estate, Jarves lived the remainder of his life just a step ahead of his creditors. James Jackson Jarves died in 1888 and is buried in Rome. Sources: Sandwich: The Town That Class Built, by Harriot Buxton Barbour. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, MA. 1948.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 20:00:14 +0000
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