# Jules Tavernier (painter)

Jules Tavernier (27 April 1844 – 18 May 1889) was a French painter, illustrator, and member of Hawaii’s Volcano School.

## Life and career

Tavernier was born on 27 April 1844 in Paris. He studied with French painter, Félix Joseph Barrias, but left France in the 1870s, never to return. Tavernier was employed as an illustrator by Harper's Magazine, which sent him, along with Paul Frenzeny, on a year-long coast-to-coast sketching tour in 1873. He arrived in San Francisco in the summer of 1874, but soon traveled south and founded an art colony on the Monterey Peninsula. In 1874, Tavernier came upon the tavern owned by his compatriot Jules Simoneau. Briefly, he established a studio at the Girandin Hotel (now called Stevenson House). In November 1875, Tavernier, alongside Walter Paris, leased space on Alvarado Street, establishing the first dedicated artist studio in Monterey. Tavernier's connection with Monterey led to his marriage to Lizzie Fulton in San Francisco in February 1877, whom he initially met in Monterey in 1876. Eventually, he continued westward to Hawaii, where he made a name for himself as a landscape painter. He was fascinated by Hawaii’s erupting volcanoes—a subject that was to pre-occupy him for the rest of his life, which was spent in Hawaii, Canada, and the western United States. Tavernier died on 18 May 1889 in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Tavernier's students included D. Howard Hitchcock, Amédée Joullin, Charles Rollo Peters and Manuel Valencia.
Public collections holding paintings by Tavernier include the Brigham Young University Museum of Art (Provo, Utah), Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (Colorado Springs, Colorado), Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento), Gilcrease Museum (Tulsa, Oklahoma), Hearst Art Gallery (Saint Mary's College of California, Moraga, California), Honolulu Museum of Art, Isaacs Art Center (Kamuela, Hawaii), Museum of Nebraska Art (Kearney, Nebraska), Oakland Museum of California, San Diego Museum of Art, Stark Museum of Art (Orange, Texas), Society of California Pioneers (San Francisco, California), Washington County Museum of Fine Arts (Hagerstown, Maryland), and Yosemite Museum (Yosemite National Park).
In 2014, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California, held an exhibition of more than 100 works by Tavernier, the first career retrospective of his work, accompanied by a catalog entitled Jules Tavernier: Artist & Adventurer. After the Crocker, the exhibition moved to the Monterey Museum of Art.

## Gallery

* Kilauea by Moonlight, 1889, oil on canvas, Isaacs Art Center
* Volcano at Night, late 1880s, oil on canvas, Honolulu Museum of Art
* Wailuku Falls, Hilo, c. 1886, pastel on paper, Honolulu Museum of Art
* Sunrise Over Diamond Head, 1888, oil on canvas, Honolulu Museum of Art
* Marin Sunset in Back of Petaluma, early 1880s, oil on canvas, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California
* White Man's Weapon, 1880, oil on canvas, Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas
* The Pioneer, 1877, oil on canvas, Society of California Pioneers

## Footnotes

* ↑ Jules Tavernier : artist & adventurer. Scott A. Shields, Claudine Chalmers, Alfred C. Harrison, Crocker Art Museum (1st ed.). Portland, Oregon. 2013. ISBN 978-0-7649-6685-9. OCLC 853287137.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
* ↑ Crocker Art Museum, "Marin Sunset, Back of Petaluma" panel, Sacramento, California, n.d.
* ↑ "New Book Fills In Some Old Blanks In Monterey's History" (PDF). Carmel-by-the-Sea, California: The Carmel Pine Cone. 10 November 2023. Retrieved 13 November 2023.
* ↑ Christopher Reynolds (18 March 2014). "In Sacramento and Monterey, a pioneer painter gets his due". Los Angeles Times.
* ↑ Victoria Dalkey (20 February 2014). "Art: Crocker exhibit devoted to works of Jules Tavernier". Sacramento Bee. Archived from the original on 18 March 2014.