Jared French

[9] French's early paintings are eerie, colorful tableauxs of still, silent figures derived from Archaic Greek statues.

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.

[10] On the level of content, he made only one, short, public statement regarding his intentions: My work has long been concerned with the representation of diverse aspects of man and his universe.

[11] [3] For the next eight years Cadmus and the Frenches summered on Fire Island and formed a photographic collective called PaJaMa ("Paul, Jared, and Margaret").

[3] In between Provincetown, Truro, Fire Island, and New York, they staged various black and white photographs of themselves with their friends, both nude and clothed.

Cavalrymen Crossing a River (1939), French's central mural for the Parcel Post Building in Richmond, Virginia, is now displayed at the Lewis F. Powell Jr. United States Courthouse . Life magazine reported that French painted himself into the mural as the figure wearing suspenders. [ 8 ]