Charles Jervas

Biography

The first readers of the translation of “Don Quixote” published in 1742 were told that its author was a certain Charles “Jarvis”. This was a printer’s error: the translator, Charles Jervas, had died three years earlier. Ever since, the book has been known as “the Jarvis translation”.

He was born around 1675. Sources give different places of birth: by some accounts Shinrone in County Offaly, by others Dublin, where his childhood was spent. His father, John Jervas, was a landowner, and his mother, Elizabeth, came from the Baldwin family, owners of Shinrone Castle. The boy’s inclination for drawing was noticed early, and his parents encouraged it.

In 1694–1695 Jervas worked in London under Godfrey Kneller, the most sought-after portrait painter in England, and studied at his academy. Around 1698 he sold a series of small copies of Raphael’s cartoons to George Clarke of All Souls College, Oxford. That money, together with help from his family and patrons, allowed him to go to the Continent: first to Paris, then to Rome. He stayed there for most of a decade and returned to London only in 1709.

In London things moved quickly. He painted portraits of the city’s writers, among them Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope; the portraits of Swift and Pope are now in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He was a friend of Swift and Pope. Pope took painting lessons from him at Jervas’s house in Cleveland Court, St James’s, and mentioned this in the poem “To Belinda on the Rape of the Lock”, written in 1713. Around 1715 Pope composed in his honour the “Epistle to Mr Jervas”, printed in 1716 in an edition of John Dryden’s translation of Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy’s treatise “The Art of Painting”. It contains lines about colours that will shine for a long time and about a line free of faults. A series of “beauties”, painted for the young Hanoverian court on commission from the Countess of Darlington around 1717–1722, is also mentioned.

After Kneller’s death in 1723, George I appointed Jervas Principal Painter in Ordinary. He kept the post under George II; by some accounts he also painted Queen Caroline. Sources give different dates for his marriage to the wealthy widow Penelope Hume: 1709 or 1727. He settled in Hampton.

Anecdotes circulated about his self-conceit. After comparing his own copy with Titian’s original, he is said to have remarked: “Poor little Tit, how he would starve!” Kneller, on hearing that his former pupil had set up a carriage with four horses, replied in his German accent that if the horses did not draw better than Jervas did, he would never get to his journey’s end. Whether either remark is authentic is hard to check, and I would treat both as hearsay.

In parallel he studied Spanish. The translation of “Don Quixote” was completed, by one account, around 1736. Jervas was the first to give the novel an introduction with a critical analysis of earlier English translations. Contemporaries praised the translation for its accuracy, later critics reproached it for stiffness and a lack of humour, but in the nineteenth century the book was reprinted many times.

In 1738 the king sent him to Italy to buy paintings by Old Masters.

Soon after his return Jervas died in London, on 2 November 1739. His heirs sold his collection, and the sale lasted nine days.