Jared French

Who was Jared French?

Jared French 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. Other artists of this movement included George Tooker and Paul Cadmus.

French received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College in 1925. Soon after this he met and befriended Cadmus in New York City. French persuaded Cadmus to give up commercial art for what he deemed, "serious painting". In 1937 French married Margaret Hoening, also an artist. For the next eight years Cadmus and the Frenches summered on Fire Island and formed a photographic collective called PaJaMa. During this period French painted murals for the WPA.

French's early paintings are eerie, colorful tableauxs of still, silent figures derived from Archaic Greek statues. His later work shows "a kind of classical biomorphism," strange, colorful, suggestive organic forms.

Jungian psychology is thought to have played an important influence upon the dream-like imagery in the paintings of French's maturity.