Jared French was born in 1905, attended Amherst College in the 1920s, and died in Italy in 1988. He was a painter, draftsman, sculptor, muralist and print-maker of enigmatic, nearly surrealist compositions of the male figure. His work has also been described as magic realism. Isolation, alienation and anxiety seem his major themes. However, French's intentions about his painting are almost as mysterious as the paintings themselves, and he clearly intended them to remain that way. He hinted that the answer to his works could be found in the writings of the psychoanalyst, C.G. Jung, whose Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious was first published in 1939.

French was a strong early influence on the well-...