American painter Jared French was BOTD in 1905. Born in Ossining, New York, he studied at Amherst College before moving to New York City to become a commercial artist. In 1928, he attended the Art Students League of New York, where he met and fell in love with Paul Cadmus. Encouraged by Cadmus to give up commercial work to concentrate on fine art, the pair travelled through France and Spain in the early 1930s, settling in Majorca. Returning to America in 1933, French and Cadmus were employed by the Section of Painting and Sculpture, a government-funded New Deal program to paint murals in post office buildings. Like Cadmus, French’s murals featured highly sexualised images of working-class men, inspired by Renaissance painting and using the then-unfashionable medium of egg tempura. He was also the model for much of Cadmus’ work, including John Smith in the mural Pocahantas Saving the Life of John Smith. In 1937, French married photographer Margaret Hoening, a fellow student of the Art Students League. They had an open marriage, allowing French to continue his relationship with Cadmus. The trio established the photography collective PaJaMa (an abbreviation of “Paul, Jared and Margaret”), photographing each other and their friends on summer holidays in Fire Island, Provincetown and Nantucket. Their subjects included Tennessee Williams, Glenway Wescott, Monroe Wheeler, Christopher Isherwood, E. M. Forster, Cadmus’s sister Fidelma and her husband Lincoln Kirstein. Cadmus and French also featured in a series of intimate photographs made by Cadmus’s lover George Platt Lynes. The Frenches settled in Vermont in the 1940s, giving Cadmus his own home on their property. French continued working in egg tempura, painting realist figures in dreamlike tableaux in a style that became known as “magic realism”. The PaJaMa collective became a quartet, as Cadmus’s boyfriend George Tooker joined the group, possibly also becoming French’s lover. In 1967, French received a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The following year, he and Margaret moved to Rome, where they lived until French’s death in 1988, aged 82.