This artist was a pupil of Sir Godfrey Kneller, and met with plentiful employment in portrait painting. His abilities were very inferior, but, says Walpole, "Such was the badness of the age's taste, and the dearth of good masters, that Jervas sat at the head of his profession, although he was defective in drawing, coloring, composition, and likeness. In general, his pictures are a light flimsy kind of fan-painting as large as life. Yet I have seen a few of his works highly colored, and it is certain that his copies of Carlo Maratti, whom he most studied and imitated, were extremely just, and scarcely inferior to the originals."