Jared French

Jared Blandford French (February 4, 1905 – January 8, 1988) was an American painter who specialized in the medium of egg tempera. He was one of the artists attributed to the style of art known as magic realism along with contemporaries George Tooker and Paul Cadmus.

Early life

Born in Ossining, New York, In 1930, while French and Cadmus were students together at New York's Art Students League, Italian artist Luigi Lucioni painted French in a painting entitled Jared French, that is currently owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994.

Career Cavalrymen Crossing a River (1939), French's central mural for the Parcel Post Building in Richmond, Virginia, is now displayed at the Lewis F. Powell Jr. United States Courthouse. Life magazine reported that French painted himself into the mural as the figure wearing suspenders. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, French painted New Deal murals. French's early paintings are eerie, colorful tableauxs of still, silent figures derived from Archaic Greek statues.

For the Section of Painting and Sculpture, French produced murals for the post office in Plymouth, Pennsylvania (1938), and for the Parcel Post Building in Richmond, Virginia (1939).

Personal life In 1937, French married Margaret Hoening (died 1998). In between Provincetown, Truro, Fire Island, and New York, they staged various black and white photographs of themselves with their friends, both nude and clothed. Most of these friends featured in the photographs were among New York's young artists, dancers and writers, and most were handsome and gay. In the photographs, 14 of which survive today, the subjects, Cadmus and French, vacillate between exposure and concealment, with French generally being the more exhibitionist of the two.

Later in the 1940s, French and his wife formed a complicated relationship with Cadmus and Cadmus' then-lover, George Tooker (1920–2011). Nude and Dress Suit, 1950, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC Evasion, 1947, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio State Park, 1946, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York Learning, 1946, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC Music, 1943, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia John Pelham, 1939, Court House Annex, Richmond, Virginia The Rope, 1954, Whitney Museum of American Art Cavalrymen Crossing a River, 1939, Court House Annex, Richmond, Virginia Safe, 1937, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, New York Mealtime, The Early Coal Miners, 1937, Plymouth Post Office, Plymouth, Pennsylvania. Mealtime, The Early Coal Miners (Mural Study), 1936, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC Mealtime, The Early Coal Miners (Mural Study), 1935, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

Exhibitions

Banfer Gallery, New York, 1969 Banfer Gallery, New York, 1967 Banfer Gallery, New York, 1965 Robert Isaacson Gallery, New York, 1962 Edwin Hewitt Gallery, New York, 1955 Edwin Hewitt Gallery, New York, 1950 Julien Levy Gallery, New York, 1939 Morgan Hall, Amherst College, Massachusetts, 1939 Vassar College Art Gallery, New York, 1939