JOHN LA FARGE has given us two avenues of approach to his personality as an artist: one through his pictures, drawings, and decorations, the other through his writings. In the drama of his artistic doings the writings serve as the chorus, which from its platform in front of the actual stage interpolates a commentary on the main action, in language always illuminative, though sometimes of rather complex meaning. For it reflects, in fact, the complexity of its author’s personality, his life-long habit of contemplation and the wide horizon over which his study has roamed, embracing many objects of desire inside and outside his art, to none of which he can tolerate a short cut, but the interdependence of which and the relative interest of the paths thereto, even the inevitable oppositions and compromises, he has always realized and valued. As Paul Bourget happily says, La Farge’s “least words betray the seeker of a kind like Fromentin, who thinks out his sensations—a rare, a very rare power.”

He was a student of art long before he entered upon it as a profession. It attracted him first as a form of culture, the practice coming later; quite an inversion of the usual progress of the art student, who gets manual facility and then culture—sometimes. Nor did art in his early days present the only form of culture. He received a classical training of the thorough sort that promotes an intimacy with classic thought and expression. His father’s house in Washington Square, well stocked with books and pictures, was the rendezvous of cultivated people, many of them ÉmigrÉs of the French Revolution or refugees from St. Domingo. When he visited Europe in 1856 he stayed in Paris at the home of his relatives, the St. Victors, where lived his bedridden great-uncle, author of many works, historical, critical, and artistic, who had known friends and foes of the French Revolution, had been an ÉmigrÉ in Russia and still retained his interest in all things, even to the theatres. Paul de St. Victor, writer and critic, was La Farge’s cousin, and many remarkable and gifted people came to the house,—Russians, members of the Institute, priests, art critics, and literary men, among them Charles Blanc and ThÉophile Gautier.

La Farge had been taught to draw in a precise, old-fashioned way by his grandfather, Binsse de St. Victor, a miniature painter of some talent, and during his visit to Europe he was advised by his father to study painting under some master, partly as an accomplishment, partly as an escape from a desultory interest in many things. He, therefore, entered the studio of Couture, who, however, recommended him to postpone painting and to study and copy the drawings of the old masters in the Louvre. “With quite a comprehension of my inevitable failure,” he says, “I made drawings from Correggio, Leonardo, and others; but my greatest fascination was Rembrandt in his etchings.” Later he followed the drawings of the old masters in Munich and Dresden, giving up an invitation to accompany Paul de St. Victor and Charles Blanc in a tour of northern Italy. “I have never known,” he writes, “whether I did well or ill, for I cannot tell what the effect upon me might have been of the inevitable impression of the great Italian paintings, seen in their own light and their native place.” He means at that period of his development, for he saw them later. Next he made a short stay in England and became acquainted with the works of the pre-Raphaelites, who did not seem disconnected from the charm of Sir Joshua and Gainsborough, or from the glories of Turner, “which yet offended by its contradiction of the urbanity and sincerity of the great masters whom I cared for most.” But the willingness of the pre-Raphaelites to meet many great problems of colour attracted him and confirmed him in the direction of his own study of colour. However, the most important European developments of that time seemed to him to be represented by Rousseau, Corot, Millet, and Delacroix. On his return to New York he entered a lawyer’s office, for, as he says, “no one has struggled more against his destiny than I; nor did I for many years acquiesce in being a painter, though I learned the methods and studied the problems of my art. I had hoped to find some other mode of life, some other way of satisfying the desire for a contemplation of truth, unbiassed, free, and detached.” His friendship with William Hunt may have decided him in his career, or his marriage in 1860, which established him in Newport, R.I.

This brief summary represents quite a remarkable method of evolution for an artist; one that could not be adopted with impunity by many young men, its very leisureliness offering temptations, of which the least evil result might be dilettanteism. But La Farge was freed from the danger by the possession of moral and mental stamina, the breadth of his sympathies even demanding this gradual development. Nor was it unaccompanied with strenuousness of interest in

the various phases of culture, of which art began by being one and grew to be the most absorbing.

It was significant that this dreamer should be attracted especially by the nature students among the living painters. That was indicative of the depth and sincerity of his contemplations. But it is still more significant that from the start he should have commenced a critical study of the problems of colour; this proved the independence of his sincerity. Another point of great significance, as affecting his subsequent career, is that, although he afterward made a close study of anatomy, in his apprentice days he seems to have drawn from drawings rather than from the living model, studying, in fact, the abstract made by others instead of the concrete directly studied by himself. Thus the habit of his mind was directed toward the generalization and significance of the figure rather than to its anatomical facts. This made him very early an enthusiastic admirer of Japanese art, and has proved at once the strength and weakness of his subsequent treatment of the figure.

It is frequently asserted that his drawing is not always correct, and from the point of view of the schools he would probably himself plead guilty to the charge. But those who insist upon the point do not perhaps quite comprehend his motive, which is less the actual structure of the form than the inherent significance of the figure. Let us grant at once that the two motives are not antagonistic, that Millet’s “Sower,” for example, is as structurally correct as it is full of significance. But that is to put La Farge to the test of one of the greatest masters of drawing, by comparison with whom very few can stand. By far the greatest number of draughtsmen, while approaching him in correctness, will be far behind him in expression. On the other hand, in the case of La Farge, the significance of a pose or gesture, the vital expression of a figure, is generally admirable. I have in mind, for example, his drawing of Bishop Hatto, pursued by rats. The distance from the thigh to the toes would appear to be exaggerated; but how wonderfully the long drawn out, tense arc of the figure stimulates the imagination to a realization of the agony of the crisis. There is another point. The figure, as it is, so exactly contributes to the decorative balance of the picture. It may be that the instinct of the decorator determined the length of limb, and perhaps also, not at all improbably, the influence of the Japanese. It would not be difficult, for instance, to find in Outamaro’s lovely prints of women just such an elongation to accentuate the svelte grace with which he wishes to invest them.

I make this suggestion with more confidence, because one can trace in the composition of this picture more than a little of the Japanese arrangement of full and empty spaces; that irregular form of composition which secures a balance by oppositions rather than by repetition of similarities. It is, indeed, the method of the nature student, as true of Velasquez and Rembrandt as of the Japanese. Not that La Farge with his choice appreciation of the old masters could be insensible to the influence of the Italians. His great altarpiece of the Ascension in the Church of the Ascension in New York is reminiscent in its structure of Raphael’s “DisputÁ.” The space is very similar in shape, and filled with a broad band of figures across the base, a central figure in the upper space, and flanking arcs of angels. Again the mural paintings of “Music” and the “Drama” in the music room of Mr. Whitelaw Reid’s New York house were evidently suggested by the pastoral scenes of the Venetian painters. The latter, however, were themselves, no doubt, suggested by the desire to emancipate painting from the rigidity of preconceived formulas of composition, and it is just this attempt to discover a compromise between the natural and the conventional which is so marked a characteristic of La Farge’s treatment of mural painting.

It may have been an early feeling after this that at least helped to draw him toward Rembrandt, especially toward his religious subjects. I find more than a little of the latter’s influence in the mural paintings in the churches of St. Thomas and of the Incarnation in New York, particularly in the solemn, serious naturalism of the grouping; in the humble devotion with which the spirit of the occasion has been comprehended, and in the significance of gesture and expression, but especially of gesture, through which this spirit has been embodied. A boy’s freshness of faith, dignified by a man’s realization of its import—a quality very rare at any period, and quite likely to be overlooked in this one. It is the outcome of a religious temperament—a thing very different from the religious habit—born of a capacity to feel deeply the significance of things, and by instinct and culture fitted to see the beauty inherent in the significance, whether it be the significance of the spiritual or of the material life or of the subtle analogy between the two. When the painter can comprehend this and set it down on the threshold of every-day experience, in such a way as to make it intimate without being commonplace, its human meaning neither lessening, nor lost in, the splendour of its expression, we may reasonably call him great.

And no one denies to La Farge a splendour of expression. He is that rara avis among artists, who not only sees the world as a pageant of coloured light, but has found means to express his visions. His inherited instinct for colour has been assiduously cultivated by observation and scientific study, the researches of Professor Root of Columbia University having been enthusiastically followed and adapted by him to his practical requirements. When circumstances brought to him the opportunity of executing windows, immediately came into play his extensive memories, his dreams of possibilities, and, equally, his independence of conventionalized methods. Finding that he could not reach adequate results in the material available, and realizing the weakness of existing methods, he experimented until he discovered the adaptabilities of opaline glass, which has a suggestion of complementary colours, “a mysterious quality of showing a golden yellow, associated with violet, a pink flush on a ground of green.” Moreover, by the infinite variety of modulations, which its making admits, it allows a degree of light and shade in each piece of glass, which not only gives modelling, but increases the depth of tone, sufficient at places to make the darker parts melt softly into the harsh lead-line. This invention by John La Farge of the applicability of opaline glass to the making of coloured windows has put a wide range of means in the hands of the artist, not only in the general richness and equally possible delicacy of effect, but in the increased subtlety attainable through complementary effects and effects of opposition; the material including all kinds of variety in the texture, quality, thickness, and even pattern of the glass, and also almost every variation of density and transparence. It is a palette of extraordinary range, perilously serviceable in the hands of an ambitious person of meagre knowledge and feeling, quite susceptive of commonplace exploitation in those of the ordinary designer. But in the hands of a true artist, who thinks in colour, and has a store of gathered observations backed with scientific assurance, it permits the fullest scope to his imagination, and the opportunity of realizing the most diverse and complex schemes of colour, allowing him to reproduce much of the mystery that time has wrought into the mediÆval stained glass, and to add to the latter’s chantlike simplicity of colour and structure the complicated harmonies of modern music. It is an art, indeed, that brings the decorator within measurable distance of the musical composer.

The new intent of this glass and the subsequent developments which have made of it a new fabric were so much the outcome of La Farge’s personal need of expression that it is not surprising he has reached results superior to those of others who employ the same medium. A reason which also contributes to his superiority is that his conception from the start formulates itself in colour, whereas the genesis of most windows would appear to be in the lineal design, clothed in colour afterward. In other words, like every true craftsman, La Farge thinks in his material. The effect of this has been, at least, twofold. In the first place, there has always been a reciprocity of influence between his imagination and his material; while he has been big enough to anticipate the possibilities, he has been big enough also to accept the limitations of the medium. In the second place,—and this really follows from the former,—he has preserved an independence in the character of the design, neither attempting to reproduce that of the old cathedral windows, nor dipping, except occasionally, into that universal cook-book of the average designer, the ornament of the Renaissance. With a larger sense of fitness he found, if anywhere, a prototype for his motives in Eastern art, not only in the mosaics of Byzantium, but in the jewelled inlays, lacquers, textiles, and cloisonnÉ of Japan. Particularly is this true of the windows of pure decoration which he has executed for private houses and again of those superb windows in the west end of Trinity Church in Boston. In these a cultivated taste will be disposed to feel that the splendour and mystery of the fabric are most abundantly manifested. It is pure decoration of the most subtle and resplendent kind.

On the other hand, as soon as the figure is introduced, particularly when the figure must subserve a religious sentiment, a compromise has to be effected between the abstract decoration and the concrete form, between the conventional and the naturalistic. And the inevitable antagonism between the two has become more difficult to reconcile in these days, both for the artist and for ourselves who enjoy his work, because we are no longer satisfied with the simple abstractions of the human form, which sufficed for the childlike faith and narrower experience of ancient peoples. In all his figure windows, therefore, it is most interesting to study how he has eschewed the pictorial motive, which unfortunately the immature taste of the public so persistently demands, and to which, either on compulsion or because he knows no better, the average designer inclines. La Farge, on the contrary, while frankly admitting the claims or the necessity of naturalistic treatment, endeavours, as far as possible, to find some modern form of abstraction for the figure, and to offset it with a freer abstraction or conventionalization in the rest of his composition; so that while the significance of the figure, its form and sentiment, is not swamped, there yet survives the impression that the window is not a picture in glass, but an elevated decoration of transparent and translucent mosaic, inlaid in a cloisonnÉ of ornamental lead-lines.

In a brief appreciation of this artist’s work it is natural to dwell upon him in his capacity of a master decorator, for the whole trend of his activities, at first, perhaps, unconsciously, later with a purpose continually strengthened and expanded, has been in this direction. And he has proved himself a master not only within the restricted field of American art, but in comparison with the master decorators of Europe.

I have spoken of La Farge’s writings being a commentary upon his artistic acts. Often it is in a man’s lighter moments that he makes clear to us the workings of his mind, and La Farge has done so in the journal which he wrote during a vacation in the South Sea Islands. It is the spontaneous utterance of a scholar, at once a dreamer and an analyst; of an artist, also, who sees pictures everywhere; and its word-painting and many-faceted allusiveness to all kinds of memories, derived from art and life and literature, render these impressions of new scenes, which still retain some flavour of the antique world, unique in their exquisite beauty and suggestiveness. Let me quote one passage: “From the intricate tangle of green we saw the amethyst sea and the white line of sounding surf, cutting through the sloping pillars of the cocoanuts that made a mall along the shore; and over on the other side of the narrow harbour the great high green wall of the mountain, warm in the sun, its fringe of cocoanut groves and the few huts hidden within it softened below by the haze blown up from the breakers. All made a picture not too large to be taken in at a glance.” Nor yet too distant. The harbour, observe, is narrow and bounded by a high green wall of mountain. The picture was not shaping itself to him as it might have done to the eyes of a pure landscapist, but in a comparatively flat pattern, as of a wall or window decoration. He sees it with the instinct of a decorator and with his own personal predilections; for he dwells upon the combination of green and blue, which any student of his work may feel to have particular fascination for him. He notes in one part the tangle of green, its suggestive subtlety of pattern and tone; in another, where the huts are half hidden, the welcome spot of density; again,

Copyright by John La Farge.