NORTH ADAMS — Jarvis Rockwell looked at the world with curiosity and a wry sense of humor, and his artwork reflected his personality on both accounts.

The oldest child of Norman and Mary Rockwell, Jarvis, who died early Saturday at age 94, was described by those who knew him as a gifted artist and deep thinker with an inventive imagination and an unmistakable belly laugh.

Sculptor Tom Patti, left, and Jarvis Rockwell speak after a Berkshire Superior Court hearing in the family's attempt to stop the Berkshire Museum from selling a number of works — including paintings by Norman Rockwell.

Jarvis, family and friends said, brought together traditional art concepts with found objects such as business cards and googly eyes, and created tableaus of pop culture and historical figures co-existing on the same fictional plane.

“He was a marvelous man,” said Laurie Norton Moffatt, executive director of the Norman Rockwell Museum. “Jarvis was one of the most creative, quixotic, expansive thinkers. He brought a great sense of humor to his outlook on the world."

Jarvis’ daughter, author and artist Daisy Rockwell, said her father died at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield following a stroke.

“My father was singularly obsessed with his own imminent demise for the past 25 or so years, so much so that everyone stopped taking it seriously and would sometimes burst into peals of laughter when he brought it up,” she said in his obituary. “Eventually he lived so long he actually stopped talking about it all the time, pausing only now and then to speculate about whether there was a heaven and what would happen on ‘the other side.’”

Artist Jarvis Rockwell is seated in a gallery at Hotel Downstreet in North Adams in 2023 alongside an arrangement of some of his figurines.

Jarvis’ expansive collection of figures from imaginary popular cultural worlds — starting with a single duck he bought in Stockbridge, shortly after his father's death in 1978 — led to a series of created works displayed at Mass MoCA, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, as well as in galleries in New York City and Scottsdale, Ariz.

“Maya,” installed at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2002, featured a massive pyramid populated with scores of figures from disparate imaginary worlds.

Jarvis revisited that theme several more times, building out shelves and pyramids where characters from different worlds, real and imaginary, could occupy the same space.

That mode was repeated in exhibits in Scottsdale, Ariz., at the Norman Rockwell Museum, and again at Mass MoCA in a 2018 exhibit titled “Us.”

While he loved collecting figures many would describe as toys, Jarvis didn’t think of them that way, Moffatt said.

“They were pop cultural figures — reflections of movies and literary and imaginary beings,” she said. “They weren’t toys. They were art.”

While Jarvis retired from the art world in his 90s, he didn’t stop making art.

“He continued to surround himself with toys and arrange them in intriguing tableaux all around his house,” Daisy wrote in the obituary.

“He was an artist of prodigious talents, born of another artist of prodigious talents, and he saw art all around him even when he no longer had the inclination to pick up a pencil and draw,” she said.

A longtime Berkshire County resident, Jarvis lived in Stockbridge and Great Barrington before moving to North Adams with his wife, Nova, whom he met as a neighbor. He became part of North Adams' art scene, working in local galleries including Downstreet Art and MCLA’s Gallery 51 and creating a mural that graces MCLA’s Bowman Hall.

“He was a humorous rabble-rouser,” MCLA art professor and friend Greg Scheckler said Monday. “He loved joking around and was always full of humorous stories from his background as an artist.

“He had this way in his art of gently connecting a lot of elements of pop culture while picking fun of them at the same time,” Scheckler said.

While Jarvis was serious about art, he also welcomed opportunities to form community with his work. While his wall drawings were a serious endeavor, installing his collections "was more participatory," Norton Moffatt said.

"If he was working with students or studio aides or museum staff, that had a playful sense — let's look at what kind of world we can create," she said.

In 2017, Jarvis and his brothers Thomas and Peter sued to prevent the sale of two of their father's works by the Berkshire Museum. The brothers withdrew from the suit in 2018 when George Lucas, who purchased "Shuffleton's Barbershop," agreed to display the painting at the Rockwell Museum for 24 months, before it would be shown at his own museum.

In a 2013 interview with Daisy, Jarvis explained why he did not pursue painting, following the same path as his father.

"He was so much the first in good painting that I couldn't move through it or get around it. I tried for a while, but every time I'd fall asleep," Jarvis said. "It's not like one day you decide. It was just too much for me so I stayed out of it."

But Norton Moffatt says Jarvis came to terms with his father's legacy.

"I observed or felt that, as he grew older, he found a place of peace with himself and his father," she said. "He knew his father’s work as a connoisseur better than anyone."

An arrangement of Jarvis Rockwell's figurings is displayed at Hotel Downstreet in North Adams in May 2023.

“Jarvis found his path," she said. "He found his own interests and brought incredible joy and creativity through the work and his art, in his drawings and drawn worlds."

Born September 3, 1931, in New Rochelle, N.Y., Jarvis Rockwell was the first of three children born to Norman and Mary Barstow Rockwell. The family moved to Arlington, Vt., in 1939.

Jarvis attended high school at the Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where, Daisy wrote, “he was full of good humor but showed little academic promise, according to rueful letters written to his mother by the headmaster.”

Jarvis then followed Norman’s footsteps into an art career, studying drawing with George Grosz at The Art Students’ League in New York. He also studied at the National Academy of Design, and later at the Boston Museum School and Los Angeles County Art Institute.

He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1952 and served in Korea, drawing for the base newspaper and obtaining his GED. When he returned, he was confronted with depression and anxiety. He moved to San Francisco, where he underwent therapy and his art was shown at the Batman Gallery.

A decade later, Jarvis returned east and then visited his brother Peter, a sculptor, in Rome. During that trip he reconnected with Susan Merrill, formerly of Lenox. Years earlier, Jarvis had awarded Merrill first place in a children's art contest. Now 24, she was a student at L'Accademia di Belle Arti.

The two were married in 1969 and had one daughter, Daisy. While they divorced in 1974, they remained friends until her death in 2017.

In 1979, Jarvis arranged a row of action figures in a window facing the house next door, where art teacher Nova Choe had recently moved with her two small children. Jarvis and Nova married in 1984, and moved to North Adams in 2002.

Jarvis was predeceased by his brother Peter, a sculptor, and brother Thomas, the author of the children's book "How To Eat Fried Worms."