Francis Lee Jaques

The way we were

As a child of Midtown Manhattan, any inklings I had of wild places were borne of the Central Park Zoo and the hallowed halls of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). e elephants, bu alos and baboons of the Akeley Hall of African Mammals became as familiar to me as cousins.

However, if Akeley is remembered for his lifesized mount of P.T. Barnum’s elephant, Jumbo, and for strangling a leopard in Africa with his bare hands, it is the resonant landscapes in the museum’s dioramas, painted by Francis Lee Jaques (1887–1969), that transport us from the Swiss Alps and Peru to the Galapagos Islands, Gobi Desert and Arctic.

In Jaques’s long-delayed, late-starting career, out of 80 diorama habitats, he painted 50—an estimated 30,000 square feet—for the AMNH alone. is includes all 18 in its Whitney Memorial Hall of Oceanic Birds, its murals and decorative maps. To paint the Hall’s immersive domed ceiling with the skyscape for albatross, petrels and frigate birds, he laid on his back on the sca olding à la Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel.

“Such beauty one wants to preserve—to make it available to others,” Jaques wrote, sensing that the natural world as he witnessed it would soon be gone.

Jaques’s (pronounced jay-kwes—accent on the jay, kwes rhyming with squeeze) expanded vision of animal environments makes him, for many, the rst wildlife artist to express entire ecological systems. He is recognized for setting his subjects into their landscape rather than simply against it.

e artist, who started life as an uneducated Midwestern farm boy, would mingle with explorers such as Osa and Martin Johnson, and artists including William R. Leigh and Charles Livingston Bull. He traveled on prestigious scienti c museum expeditions to Europe, Central and South America, the Bahamas, the South Paci c and Arctic, sketching panoramic landscapes for his dioramas’ backgrounds, collecting vegetation for their foregrounds and skinning specimens for mounting.

Jaques’s understanding of nature reaches back to his rugged, self-reliant youth in Kansas and Minnesota during the last pioneer years on the prairie. Born in Genesco, Ill., in 1887 in his grandfather’s white frame house, his father Ephraim Parker Jaques, of French Huguenot descent, moved the 12-year-old boy and his family to his wife’s people in Elmo, Kan., where chores included making soap, churning butter and cutting and thrashing hay. By 14, Francis was working 10 hours a day, six days a week, feeding and milking cows for seven dollars a month plus room and board.

Ephraim wasn’t much of a farmer, but he sure could hunt. He fed his family prairie birds and wildfowl and earned cash guiding duck hunters. Meanwhile Francis lled his photographic memory with di erent silhouettes and ight patterns against a lit sky.

When it looked like they would never inherit his father-in-law’s farm, Ephraim moved the family again in 1903, this time to the sawmill town of Aitkin, Minn., traveling overland for six weeks in a covered farm wagon. Like a little prairie schooner, its four-horse team was driven by Francis’s brother Alfred, his mother and sister at his side. Francis and his father walked the 650 miles. e family settled on a 73-acre farm they called Seven Oaks, building a log cabin on a Mississippi River oxbow full of wood ducks and hooded mergansers with $100 of material.

Ephraim and Francis worked oating log rafts of elm, ash and maple downstream to the mill. ey hauled railroad ties and supplied rewood to the courthouse. At one point, while studying surveying, locomotive ring and electrical work, Francis stoked 12 to 15 tons of coal a day into the steam engines of the Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railway. Eventually, he went to work for a local taxidermist, buying out his boss for $10 in backpay. He spent nine cold winters mounting deer heads for $6 each, working 60-hour weeks and walking the seven miles between home and work in the dark and snow. He was already 30 years old when he was drafted into World War I, serving in France.

It was during training in San Francisco for the U.S. Army Coast Artillery Corp, on Christmas Day 1917, that Jaques viewed his rst real art exhibition in the Palace of Fine Arts. Seeing an animal habitat diorama of a mule deer in a snowy forest at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, Jaques decided on the spot to become a museum artist. Yet after the war, he worked in the Duluth shipyards, then nally, at age 34, as a fulltime commercial artist, drawing bicycle brochures for the Duluth Photo-Engraving Company. It was likely here that he developed an eye for detail and the ability to draw the nest lines, as well as adopting the use of strong colors to construct design.

Only at 37, in 1924, did his life take a turn toward artistic success when he shot a black duck, painted it in ight and sent that along with two other oil paintings to Dr. Frank M. Chapman, curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History of New York. Jaques would work as a museum artist at the AMNH for the next 18 years. e black ducks would be the subject of his 1940 U.S. Federal Duck Stamp. Few artists can create a convincing landscape not only on the at surface of a canvas, but also on the con ned curved walls of a natural history museum diorama, ingenuously recreating a three-dimensional panorama of everything identi able. Jaques instinctively comprehended entire environments and the movement of wildlife within them, translating into art their connection to the stretch of prairie or autumn sky. Freed from extraneous detail, they have space to move around in; they have come from one place and are going to another. ey seem to still have all of nature at their disposal. Jaques knew it would not last.

Not interested in being a “feather painter,” Jaques never strived for more detail than he could perceive at a given distance under natural conditions. is meant reducing his subjects to their essential recognizable selves, conjuring up a ock of geese heading north with just a few lines.

In the eld, he used photography to preserve reference material, to catch the precise play of light and shadow under a changing sky. He sketched quickly in pencil, made extensive eld notes, and created carefully coded “paint-by-number” color charts of hues. In the studio, he worked out his perspective and composition by making cutouts of the relative shapes at di erent distances, then moving them around.

Finally in 1927, the long-term bachelor married writer, and future collaborator, Miss Florence Page (1880-1972). “We’ve never had any trouble about women or money and lived happily ever after,” wrote Francis. In fact, they would write six books together, starting with their now classic Canoe Country (1938) about their honeymoon and holidays on the Minnesota Boundary Waters.

On his 55th birthday, the very day he was eligible to collect a pension, Jaques resigned from the AMNH. In 1953 he and Florence packed up the Upper West Side apartment they had shared for 23 years and returned to Minnesota, buying a home near St. Paul where they could walk out the backdoor to their canoe.

Jaques continued painting museum dioramas on a freelance basis, including for Yale Peabody Museum, the AMNH and a dozen for Minnesota’s Bell’s Museum, including the wolves on the rocky cli s of Lake Superior’s north shore and the moose of Gun int Beach.

He also did magazine covers, especially for Outdoor Life during World War II, producing its cover every month for four-and-a-half years. He also illustrated their oversized 1956 book Outdoor Life’s Gallery of North American Game, whose title page describes Jaques as the “foremost artist of the outdoors.” at income, plus his museum pension, equaled his museum pay, allowing them to travel.

Jaques was equally talented in the small-scale rare art of scratchboard. at is, working in black-andwhite by scratching, or rather incising, lines with a knife or sharp tool through the surface of dried black ink, revealing the white chalk or clay-coated board underneath. e result is something between a wood engraving and a pen and ink drawing; it makes for especially elegant book illustration. In fact, Jaques’s success in illustrating some 40 books with scratchboard drawings helped revive this castaway technique, which gave publishers the advantage of using a photo-mechanical printing process rather than requiring engravings by the artist.

His stylish scratchboards illustrate three titles by the North Country’s “Muir and oreau,” naturalist Sigurd Olson (1899-1982), including Singing Wilderness (1956), about his travels in the lands and waters north of Lake Superior. While many images are classic depictions of cabins and canoes, others are eye-popping in their originality of composition and ability to express the di erent seasons and time of day.

In these narratives of outdoorsmen and animals in the landscapes of wild places, Jaques contrasts dark patches of forest, water or rock against the naked whites of snow and sky. “His large white spaces give a sense of openness and depth for the eye to explore,” writes one author. To create contour, mass and distance, he lays down patterns of lines in di erent directions, which gives a sculptural feeling to his geological formations and animals. His careful balance of shapes and patterns of nely scratched lines “capture the distilled essence of the natural objects they represent.” ere is something sad about revisiting these books and dioramas because they speak of what was and what now is gone. Jaques wrote about human progress: “I know—the country had to be developed, but we developed it very wastefully—we might have made it beautiful. It is, so far as we could make it, ugly.” S

Brooke Chilvers is not sure the AMNH will be the same without its equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt at the entrance; and maybe that’s okay.