Information on the artist
Jaro Hess was born in
1889 in a small Czechoslovakian village. At the age of 16, Hess joined
the French Foreign Legion for what he described as “the worst five years
of my life,” in Algiers, in a 1929 Grand Rapids Herald interview. He
ended up escaping as a
stowaway on a boat back to France.
Hess
went on to graduate from the University of Prague with a degree in
metallurgy, a training that brought him to the U.S. in 1910. Hess stayed
briefly in Pittsburgh working at steel mills in the Midwest. He then
turned to photo-etching, and then to horticulture when he moved to Bay
City. His hybridization of delphiniums won him membership in the Royal
Horticultural Society of London, and brought him an important contact by
the name of Charles Greenway, then owner of the Booth newspaper chain.
Hess
began working for Greenway as a gardener and landscaper, and moved with
Greenway to a home on Reeds Lake. A story on Hess in the Herald, rival
of the Booth-owned Press; however, got Hess fired. Hess turned to
designing rock gardens and did landscaping for homes on Reeds and Fisk
Lake, including the Blodgett estate. When the Depression came, Hess made
a living tying flies for trout fishing before joining an aircraft
factory out
east at the start of World War II.
Back in Grand
Rapids after the war, Hess painted dioramas for the Public Museum. In
1950, he retired at age 61, to devote the rest
of his years to painting. He died in 1979, at the age of 90.
Hess is best known for his children's fantasy painting, often sold
as a poster, “The Land of Make Believe,” a work he created for
the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago
