John La Farge
New York, 1835 - 1910, Providence
LC Heading: LaFarge, John, 1835-1910
9/22/2017 I.S.
La Farge, John (American painter and author, 1835-1910)
La Farge, John Frederick Lewis Joseph (31 Mar. 1835-14 Nov. 1910), artist and writer, was born in New York City, the son of John Frederick La Farge, a French émigré, and Louisa Josephine Binsse de Saint-Victor, the daughter of French émigrés. La Farge was raised near Washington Square in New York. His father's success in real estate provided a prosperous home environment. Surrounded by books and fine art, La Farge learned early in life to appreciate his French Catholic heritage. At age six, he took drawing lessons from his maternal grandfather, Louis Binsse de Saint-Victor, a successful miniaturist. Later, at Columbia Grammar School in New York City, La Farge learned to paint with watercolors in the English manner.
Beginning in 1848, La Farge attended the French Catholic college of St. John's in New York, the present Fordham University. In 1850, after being expelled for fighting with another student, he transferred to St. John's parent school, Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Shortly after graduating in 1853, La Farge apprenticed with a New York law firm in accordance with his father's wishes. By 1855 he had also qualified for a general master's degree from Mount St. Mary's.
Even as La Farge dutifully pursued a law career, he maintained an interest in art. In 1854 he studied in his spare time with an unknown French artist (perhaps Régis Gignoux). A watershed event occurred in April 1856, when he and two of his brothers traveled to France to meet their French relatives. In Paris, La Farge visited the leading literary salons of the day, benefiting from the influence of his mother's cousin, Paul de Saint-Victor, a famous critic. He visited the ateliers of such painters as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Théodore Chassériau and studied drawing for a couple of weeks under Thomas Couture, a teacher popular among Americans. Impatient with studio methods, La Farge followed Couture's advice to stop attending his studio and to instead copy old master drawings at the Louvre.
La Farge traveled extensively throughout Europe. During a tour of northern France and Belgium, altar paintings and stained glass in religious edifices caught his attention. He visited museums in Munich, Dresden, Copenhagen, and Switzerland, copying drawings and paintings by the old masters. In October 1857, La Farge's travels were cut short by news that his father was seriously ill. He returned to the United States via London, and visited the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, a massive assemblage of old master and contemporary paintings from British private and royal collections. This final experience of La Farge's stay abroad instilled in him a keen appreciation of artists as diverse as Raphael, Van Dyck, and the British Pre-Raphaelites.
The death of La Farge's father in June 1858 marked a dual liberation for La Farge. He not only found himself independently wealthy under the terms of his inheritance, but he also was freed from parental pressure to practice law. He aspired to a career in art, but he recognized his lack of training in easel painting as a major impediment. He considered returning to Europe for academic study but decided in 1859 to move to Newport, Rhode Island, to work under William Morris Hunt, a former pupil of Couture.
La Farge found Hunt a good teacher in many respects but complained that Hunt had abandoned the realistic figure painting methods of Couture, including modeling, brushstroke, and general technical approach. In their place, Hunt had adopted the more stylized techniques of the French Barbizon artist Jean-François Millet. Given this disappointment, La Farge might well have left Newport shortly after his arrival had he not met Margaret Mason Perry, a member of an illustrious Newport family. Their courtship, begun in late 1859, immediately faced a serious conflict posed by differing religious backgrounds. In the end, La Farge's Catholicism won out over Perry's Episcopalianism. They were married on 15 October 1860, three weeks before she joined the Catholic church. The couple had ten children, seven of whom survived to adulthood.
La Farge's marriage rooted him firmly in Newport for the next fifteen years. Dissatisfied with Hunt as a teacher, La Farge decided to learn easel painting on his own through experimentation and practice. Two ambitious religious subjects, St. Paul Preaching at Athens (1860-1862; location unknown) and a triptych of the Crucifixion (1861-1863; side panels in a private chapel in Trujillo, Spain; central panel never executed), occupied La Farge for several years. In both projects, he sought to merge conventional religious imagery with realistic lighting and landscape effects. Similarly, in a number of portraits and figure studies, La Farge sought to replace the mannerisms of conventional figure works with vibrant, atmospheric effects (e.g., A Bather [Woman Bathing], 1868, Worcester Art Museum; Portrait of Boy and a Dog, 1869, private collection).
La Farge began painting landscapes and still lifes from nature, focusing on realistic weather conditions and lighting effects. Although these interests mirrored methods employed by the French impressionists around the same time, La Farge also drew upon Barbizon and Pre-Raphaelite precedents for his plein air work. La Farge was scientific in his approach to painting from nature. Conversant with current color theories, he had studied the principles of optics and made extensive use of photographic reproductions, becoming proficient in the operation of cameras. His studies culminated in two large canvases, Paradise Valley (New England Pasture Land) (1866-1868, private collection) and The Last Valley--Paradise Rocks (1867, private collection). Both paintings were exhibited in major forums for over three decades, including annual exhibitions of the Yale School of Fine Arts (New Haven, Conn., 1871), the London Society of French Artists (1873), the National Academy of Design (New York, 1876), and the Society of American Artists (New York, 1878, 1892), garnering enthusiastic international acclaim. Numerous other works of a more modest scale earned La Farge an avid following in Boston and New York, and the sale of small landscapes and floral pictures supported La Farge and his family throughout their Newport years.
La Farge also earned both income and praise as a result of his book illustrations, a genre he valued as highly as easel painting. His illustrations, which were often inventive and visionary, included designs for the works of Browning, Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. La Farge broke with the prevailing American cartoon-like illustrations by emulating the more realistic British Pre-Raphaelite graphic styles. His most successful book plates, prepared in 1864 for a Christmas gift book edition of Tennyson's Enoch Arden, sparked a small revolution in the United States in the field of illustration. Eventually, La Farge's graphic work became central to heated debates over the roles of wood engravers and photomechanical processes in artistic pursuits.
During this so-called "Newport Period,"; La Farge traveled frequently to Boston and New York, establishing important social and professional contacts. He became intimate with many of the foremost personalities of his day, including the historian Henry Adams; architects Henry Van Brunt, William Ware, and Henry Hobson Richardson; scientist Clarence King; writer William Dean Howells; politician John Hay; artists Elihu Vedder and Winslow Homer; and Henry James and William James, brothers he had first met at Hunt's Newport studio. From these associations, La Farge garnered a lifelong reputation as a genial conversationalist with a propensity for hypochondriac complaints. Friends compared him to a venerable oriental sage, at once brilliant, charismatic, and impenetrable.
From the quiet of the Newport years, La Farge emerged in the mid-1870s as a fashionable decorative artist based in New York. The key event in this transition was his commission in 1875 to oversee the interior decoration of Trinity Church in Boston, which was designed by the architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Drawing upon Romanesque church decoration in southern France, La Farge created a design that was carried out by dozens of artisans and artists working in an unheated church still under construction, difficult conditions exacerbated by a short time schedule. The resulting interior was so successful that its completion in 1876 is often heralded as the start of the "American Renaissance," a period of eclectic, monumental achievements in the decorative arts that lasted until the onset of World War I. Virtually overnight, La Farge became one of the most highly regarded decorative artists of his generation.
At this juncture, La Farge realized that his days as an easel painter were numbered. In 1878 and 1879 he sold the contents of his studio at a private auction and announced his intention to devote himself to decorative work. Decorative commissions formed the heart of La Farge's artistic livelihood for the remainder of his life. He completed over a dozen major mural schemes, including the opulent interior of the Cornelius Vanderbilt II house in New York (1880-1882, razed in 1927); a mural of the Ascension in the Church of the Ascension, New York (1886-1888); and lunettes and spandrels for the Minnesota state capitol in St. Paul (1904) and the Baltimore courthouse (1906-1907). He became best known, however, for his work in stained glass in both ecclesiastical and secular contexts.
La Farge's interest in stained glass dated from his earliest travels through European cathedrals. It had been further stimulated in 1873, when, on a brief visit to Europe, he met Edward Burne-Jones and saw numerous Pre-Raphaelite windows. For the next several years, La Farge designed and supervised the construction of several windows, following English techniques and precedents. Dissatisfied with the results, he embarked around 1879 on a more experimental approach that employed opalescent glass of various textures. Using layers of glass, semiprecious stones, and molded glass, La Farge patented in 1880 a method of making windows with opalescent glass that is generally credited as the start of a new stained-glass movement. For his accomplishment, La Farge received the Legion of Honor from the French government in 1889.
La Farge's great success as a decorative artist had several unfortunate consequences. Required by his work to live in Boston or New York while his family remained in Newport (his wife refused to give up her house there), La Farge found himself a virtual bachelor. Even though he eventually employed two of his sons as studio assistants, his relationship with his family became distant. His personal troubles were exacerbated by legal problems that accompanied his rising popularity. In the early 1880s, constantly led by perfectionism to rework windows and continually searching for unusual glasses, La Farge spent more money on commissions than they brought in, resulting in his failure to meet the demands of creditors. In late 1883 he went bankrupt and was forced to take on partners, who formed the La Farge Decorative Art Company as a means of handling La Farge's business matters. Because of conflicting personalities and the efforts of his partners to take artistic control out of La Farge's hands, this enterprise failed in 1885, and La Farge was arrested on trumped-up charges of grand larceny, brought by his partners because La Farge, in retaliation for their trying to take control, had concealed drawings and photographs needed to execute the decorative works encharged to the company. Although later vindicated, La Farge permanently lost the opportunity to pursue the kind of commercial success attained by his rival in opalescent stained glass, Louis Comfort Tiffany. Architects who once provided La Farge with commissions shunned him after his arrest, and he lost some major commissions, including a window for Memorial Hall at Harvard, a project named in the grand larceny lawsuit. La Farge never again enjoyed the wide patronage he had during the early 1880s. He instead became a free agent, executing decorative commissions by contracting with artisans and artists who were formerly employed in his decorative arts company.
La Farge's ultimate failure as a commercial decorative artist left him time to pursue interests that otherwise might have been sacrificed. In the summer of 1886 he fulfilled a long-held ambition and traveled to Japan at the invitation of his old friend from Boston, Henry Adams. For three months, they visited temples and shrines in Tokyo, Nikko, Osaka, and Kyoto, experiences that inspired La Farge to write a series of illustrated articles and a travel book on Japan (Century Magazine, 1890-1893; An Artist's Letters from Japan, 1897). La Farge and Adams undertook an even more exotic trip in 1890 when, for a year and a half, they visited the island groups of Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji, and Tahiti. Again deeply moved, La Farge expended great efforts to produce illustrated writings documenting the South Seas trip (Scribner's Magazine, 1901; Century Magazine, 1904; Reminiscences of the South Seas, 1912).
La Farge produced nearly 300 watercolors inspired by his travels. Throughout the 1890s, he not only found a lucrative market for these pictures, but he also realized their potential for communicating to the public the substance of his experiences. In 1894 La Farge accepted an invitation from the French government to show his work at the 1895 French Salon. His collection of over 200 travel pictures, gathered under the title "Records of Travel," was shown in both Paris and New York. The exhibition elevated La Farge's reputation as a watercolorist, creating a keen demand for his watercolors that lasted until the end of his life.
La Farge also enjoyed great popularity throughout his life as a teacher, writer, and speaker. His earliest publication, "An Essay on Japanese Art," a chapter in Raphael Pumpelly's Across America and Asia (1870), broke new ground in the United States for the study of Asian art. His lectures to aspiring artists delivered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1893 proved so popular that they were published as Considerations on Painting (1895). Similarly, his lectures on Barbizon art given at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1903 produced The Higher Life in Art (1908). La Farge's essays on old and modern masters such as Van Dyck, Rubens, Rembrandt, Hokusai, and Michelangelo appeared in serial form in McClure's Magazine beginning in 1902 and later in his book Great Masters (1903). On his death bed, La Farge completed a collection of essays published as One Hundred and One Masterpieces (1912), based in part on articles published in McClure's (1903-1908). He also left unfinished a book manuscript completed by his executrix Grace Edith Barnes and published as The Gospel Story in Art (1913).
Although he remained active until the end of his life, La Farge's later years were overshadowed by declining health and prodigious debts. His wife tried to care for him during his last six months despite his difficult and at times eccentric behavior, but not long before his death she was forced to commit him to Butler Hospital, a mental institution in Providence, Rhode Island. After his death, she not only had to turn over La Farge's estate to his creditors but also had to pay certain debts out of her own pocket.
Dozens of obituaries appearing in newspapers throughout the world eulogized La Farge as a scion of traditional canons of Western art and, as described by his biographer Royal Cortissoz, "America's only old master." But by the 1920s his reputation had tarnished, as avant-garde critics branded him "eclectic" and retrograde. Despite periodic revivals of interest in his works, including a retrospective mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1936, it was not until the 1970s that serious scholarship led to a rehabilitation of La Farge's reputation. By the time the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and the Smithsonian Institution organized a traveling retrospective of his work in 1987, La Farge had been firmly reestablished as a "modern old master" who boldly embraced technical innovations and reformed the arts of illustration and stained-glass design in the United States, while simultaneously seeking to preserve traditional artistic prototypes.
Bibliography
Most documents related to La Farge's artistic production are found in the La Farge Family Papers, Department of Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. This repository will eventually contain all working files for the "Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of John La Farge" by the artist's late grandson Henry A. La Farge. The earliest biography of La Farge, Cecilia Waern's John La Farge, Artist and Writer (1896), is of particular interest because of La Farge's extensive direct contributions to the book. Similarly, Royal Cortissoz, John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study (1911), is based on La Farge's autobiographical manuscript now housed with the Royal Cortissoz Papers at the Beinicke Library, Yale University. Henry Adams et al., John La Farge: Essays (1987), a book published in conjunction with La Farge's 1987 retrospective, contains copious illustrations, extensive discussions of works, a study of La Farge's writings, a detailed chronology, a listing of public decorative projects, and a full bibliography. An obituary is in the New York Times, 15 Nov. 1910.
James L. Yarnall
Citation:
James L. Yarnall. "La Farge, John Frederick Lewis Joseph";
http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00499.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 16:19:41 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)
Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.
Person TypeIndividual
Last Updated8/7/24
active New York, about 1896 - about 1920
Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, 1846 - 1912
Dublin, 1848 - 1907, Cornish, New Hampshire
Salem, Massachusetts, 1853 - 1908, London