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Jaques, Francis Lee (1887‒1969)

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Federal Duck Stamp Design

Francis Lee Jaques, Federal Duck Stamp Design. Print (lithograph), ca. 1940. Gift of William Webster. Used with the permission of the Bell Museum and the University of Minnesota.
Holding location: Bell Museum, University of Minnesota

Francis Lee Jaques emerged from rural Minnesota in the 1930s and 40s to become a nationally known wildlife artist. After two decades at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, he returned to his home state to paint a much-loved series of habitat dioramas at the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum. His images of Minnesota are a valuable record of the state’s natural history.

Generations of museum-goers across the country have seen his paintings, but few recognize his name. Yet Francis Lee Jaques helped shape America’s vision of nature in the twentieth century.

“Lee” Jaques (JAY-kweez) was born in Geneseo, Illinois, in 1887. After several lean years in Illinois and Kansas, the family moved to a farm north of Aitkin, Minnesota, in 1903.

As a young man, Lee tried many jobs: taxidermist, railway fireman, electrical engineer. But he was always drawn to art, especially wildlife art. Rural life in Aitkin County offered him opportunities to draw and paint local plants and animals, including game the Jaques family hunted.

Upon returning from service in World War I, Jaques worked in Duluth as a commercial artist. After some informal training and much practice, in 1924 he sent three paintings to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York. The museum swiftly hired him as a staff artist.

For eighteen years at the AMNH, Jaques specialized in painting backgrounds for habitat dioramas. Combining taxidermy mounts, plants, and realistic painted backgrounds, habitat dioramas were—and remain—a central feature of natural history museums. Jaques painted dozens of dioramas for the AMNH, many still on display. He also traveled throughout the world with the museum’s scientific expeditions.

In 1927, Jaques married the writer Florence Page. The spent their honeymoon in what is now the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, sparking a lifelong love of this area and a commitment to its preservation. Florence wrote about their experiences in Canoe Country (1938), which Lee illustrated. The couple would publish five more books about their travels exploring nature.

Birds, especially ducks, were a favorite subject. In an era before high-speed photography, Jaques was noted for his accurate images of birds in flight. In 1940, his design of black ducks was used for the annual Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp, better known as the Federal Duck Stamp.

The same year, Jaques was invited to work at the University of Minnesota’s natural history museum. The museum (later named the Bell Museum, for benefactor James Ford Bell) was creating a series of dioramas depicting the state’s natural diversity, and curator Thomas Sadler Roberts felt Jaques was a natural first choice as artist.

Jaques’s first Bell diorama depicted wolves at Lake Superior. Moose, elk, cranes, shorebirds, and more followed. Between 1940 and 1964, the artist painted nine large and eleven medium-sized dioramas for the Bell Museum.

The 1940s and 50s also saw Jaques in demand as an illustrator of popular natural history books. These included three works by Minnesota naturalist and conservationist Sigurd Olson, who became a personal friend.

For Jaques, artistic appreciation and conservation went hand in hand. Late in life, the artist wrote, “The shape of things has always given me the most intense satisfaction…Everything one sees and senses.” He added that “the keenest sense of all has been in wildlife, and that includes its habitat. Such beauty one wants to preserve—to make it available, as far as one can, to others.”

Jaques’s paintings and illustrations continue to be at once beautiful works of art and accurate sources of information about the natural world. And in an era of rapidly changing climate, his faithful depictions of Minnesota landscapes take on new importance as records of change over time.

Francis Lee Jaques passed away in 1969, and Florence Page Jaques in 1971. Florence donated the couple’s art collections to the Bell Museum. Her donation forms the core of the museum’s Jaques archive.

In 2018, the Bell Museum opened in a new building in St. Paul at 2088 Larpenteur Avenue West. All of Jaques’s large diorama paintings remain on permanent display. The Jaques Art Center and Museum, which opened in Aitkin in 1995, holds the largest collection of Jacques's art outside the Bell Museum.

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© Minnesota Historical Society
  • Bibliography
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“F. L. Jaques: American Artist, 1987–1969.” Special Issue. Naturalist, Spring 1970.
Jaques, Florence Page. Francis Lee Jaques: Artist of the Wilderness World. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973.

Jaques, Francis Lee. [Autobiography.] Handwritten document and typewritten copies, ca. 1960s. Bell Museum, St. Paul.

Johnston, Patricia Condon. The Shape of Things: The Art of Francis Lee Jaques. Afton, MN: Afton Historical Society Press, 1994.

Luce, Donald T., and Laura M. Andrew. Francis Lee Jaques, Artist-Naturalist (1887–1969). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.

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Turning Point

In 1940, Jaques begins painting diorama backgrounds for the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum. His focus begins shifting from his work in New York City to his home state of Minnesota. In the same year, the Jaques is chosen to design the annual Federal Duck Stamp.

Chronology

1887

Francis Lee Jaques is born on September 28 to Ephraim Parker Jaques and Emma Jane (Monninger) Jaques in Geneseo, Illinois.

1903

In the spring, the Jaques family moves to Aitkin, Minnesota.

1918

After serving in World War I, Jaques works as a commercial illustrator in Duluth. He also takes informal art lessons from Minnesota painter Clarence C. Rosenkranz. It is his first art training.

1924

Jaques sends samples of his art to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. He is promptly hired as a staff artist.

1925

Jaques joins AMNH scientists on an expedition to Panama and Peru. Over the next decade, he will travel with the museum to the Bahamas, the South Pacific, the Alps, and the Arctic, among other places.

1927

Jaques marries the writer Florence Page.

1938

The University of Minnesota publishes Canoe Country, written by Florence Page Jaques and illustrated by her husband. It is the first of the couple’s many collaborations.

1940

Granted leave from the AMNH, Jaques begins painting dioramas for the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum. His first two dioramas depict wolves on the north shore of Lake Superior and shorebirds on Lake Pepin.

1940

Jaques designs the year’s Federal Duck Stamp.

ca. 1940

Jaques begins making the “Great North Road,” a detailed model railway set in a fanciful North Woods. It is now at the Minnesota Museum of Mining in Chisholm.

1940s-1950s

Jaques paints dioramas for the Bell Museum, the Boston Museum of Science, Yale’s Peabody Museum, the University of Nebraska State Museum, and others. This is also his most prolific period of book and magazine illustration.

1953

Lee and Florence Jaques permanently relocate from New York to Minnesota.

1969

Francis Lee Jaques passes away at the age of eighty-one.

1971

Florence Page Jaques passes away. She leaves Lee’s artworks to the Bell Museum and a complete manuscript biography of her husband.

1973

Doubleday publishes Florence’s Francis Lee Jaques: Artist of the Wilderness World.

1995

The Jaques Art Center and Museum opens in Aitkin in an historic 1911 building (a former Carnegie library).