Millicent Jarvis

Millicent Jarvis (b. 1839-?) was an American painter who worked for nearly thirty years in the Boston area, where the best Boston painters of the period exerted a significant influence on her work. She was listed as Miss Millicent Jarvis when she opened her first studio at 149A Tremont Street in 1876, at a moment when Boston was flourishing as one of the leading centers of American art. From 1882 until 1892 she was not listed in the City Directory, a period during which her whereabouts and activity remain unrecorded. She reappeared in 1893 at 180 Tremont Street, and two years later moved to 108 Mt. Vernon Street on Beacon Hill, one of the most distinguished addresses in nineteenth-century Boston, where she maintained a studio until 1903.

Jarvis worked across the range of subjects favored by American painters of her generation, producing portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. Her participation in the vibrant Boston exhibition scene is documented through her contributions to the Boston Art Club, one of the most important local venues for professional painters of the period. She exhibited two oils at the Boston Art Club in 1877, entitled Wild Roses and Portrait, and in 1881 she showed a watercolor titled River Sketch, Concord, Mass., subjects that reflect the wider late nineteenth-century interest in New England landscape and the pastoral tradition then flourishing among American painters.

Jarvis belongs to the generation of American women artists who established professional practices in the years following the Civil War, when the growing number of women pursuing serious artistic careers began to transform the American art community. Boston during her active years was home to distinguished painters including William Morris Hunt, Frank Duveneck, Edmund Tarbell, and Frank Weston Benson, whose refined figural and atmospheric traditions shaped the character of Boston painting through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her pictures are appreciated today as thoughtful examples of Boston painting from this important period.