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Jules Tavernier 

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Artist's Biography

Jules Tavernier began his career in Paris, as a student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and as an exhibitor at the Salon. He emigrated to America after the Franco-Prussian War and was dispatched to San Francisco in 1874 to do illustrations for articles in Harper’s Weekly. Tavernier found the culture and environment so stimulating that he made San Francisco his permanent home. Tavernier was a versatile painter, feeling equally at home doing landscapes, portraits and genre paintings. One of Tavernier’s major interests was ballooning, and on October 4, 1874, he and three others took an ascension that started at Woodward’s Gardens, San Francisco, and ended up in near tragedy east of Oakland. A detailed article in the Alta California newspaper described the event, and many years later, Tavernier recalled the incident for a reporter for Hawaii’s Pacific Commercial Advertiser, claiming that the balloon burst during the descent. (Feb. 25, 1889). In May of 1875, the San Francisco Call took note of our painting with the following description: “The spectator is at a great elevation—on a level with the aerial ship and its human freight. At a great depth the green earth may be seen through the cold, gray fogs, while the upper air surrounding the voyagers is clear, and the heaven is canopied with vast bodies of warm cloud, illumined by the declining sun, which has sunk below the horizon…” According to the family history, the artist gave the painting to his friend, David McRoberts, a reporter for the Call, who was one of the passengers in the balloon. The painting is a rare and perhaps unique record of early aviation in America, in addition to being a major work of art by a fascinating, if eccentric, painter at the top of his powers.