James Jackson Jarves

Born in Boston in 1818, he became one of the earliest American champions of Italian "primitive" and Old Master painting. Before that, he spent important years in Honolulu, where he ran The Polynesian, an early English-language newspaper in the Hawaiian Islands, and took part in public life connected with the Hawaiian Kingdom.

In the 1850s he moved to Florence, where he served as a U.S. vice-consul and built the art collection that made his name. At a time when many collectors overlooked these older religious pictures, he argued for their artistic value and assembled a remarkable group of works that later became closely associated with Yale.

When other institutions declined to buy the collection, Yale ultimately acquired a large part of it after a financial arrangement with him collapsed in 1871. That group of paintings, now known as the Jarves Collection, helped introduce generations of American students and museumgoers to early Italian art. He died in 1888, remembered as both a lively man of letters and a pioneering collector with an unusually sharp eye.