Jared French American, 1905-1988

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 along with contemporaries George Tooker and Paul Cadmus.

Born in Ossining, New York, French received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College in 1925. Soon after this he met and befriended Paul Cadmus (1904–1999) in New York City, who became his lover. French persuaded Cadmus to give up commercial art for what he deemed, "serious painting". 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.

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. 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. The highly stylized, archaic-looking figures in his paintings suggest that they are representative of the ancestral memory of all mankind, what Carl Jung called "the collective unconscious". French himself was never explicit about the sources of his imagery, although on a stylistic level, the influence of early Italian Renaissance paintings by such masters as Mantegna and Piero della Francesca is evident, as it is also in the work of both Tooker and Cadmus.