Jules Tavernier

Who was Jules Tavernier?

Jules Tavernier was a French painter and is considered the most important artist of Hawaii’s Volcano School. He was born in Paris in 1844 and died in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1889. He studied with the French painter, Félix Joseph Barrias, but left France in the 1870s, never to return. Tavernier was employed as an illustrator by Harper's Magazine, which sent him on assignment to California in the 1870s. Eventually he continued westward to Hawaii, where he made a name for himself as a landscape and portrait painter. He was fascinated by Hawaii’s erupting volcanoes—a subject that was to pre-occupy him for the rest of his life, which was spent in Hawaii, Canada and the western United States. His students included D. Howard Hitchcock, Amédée Joullin, Charles Rollo Peters and Manuel Valencia.