JOHN LA FARGE

La Fargeis an exceptional man in American painting—the exception that will perhaps prove the value of tradition and education in the craft. More than any other in our history he was born to art. He did not live through a barefoot stage on a farm and then by chance come to a speaking acquaintance with painting at twenty or thereabouts; he could not boast of a struggle against adverse circumstances in an uncongenial environment. On the contrary, he was rather luxuriously raised in a city, and as a child found art in the family circle and a part of the family life. He had begun to see, hear, and think about it at six years of age. At thirty, when he definitely decided to accept painting as a vocation, he knew the tale quite well, was highly endowed intellectually, and had the insight and the imagination to see things in significant aspects. What wonder that he made an impression and left a body of work that voiced authority! He himself became a master, caught up the torch and carried on the light, spreading it and diffusing it in this new world. He was an inheritor and transmitter of art as well as a creator of it.

By that I do not mean that La Farge was raised in a studio and trained in hand and eye like a Florentine apprentice, but rather that his family, with its collateral branches, was made up of highly educated dilettanti, and art as a theme was ever up with them for discussion and appreciation. He grasped it historically and æsthetically long before he took it up professionally. The practical processes were taught him, to some extent, even as a child; but the philosophy came first and remained with him to the last. It was the French philosophy of taste—the best of the time—and La Farge himself was French save for the accident of his birth here in New York. It was the tradition of Delacroix that he finally accepted and transplanted here in American soil, adding to it, of course, his own profound thought and fine feeling. “He prided himself on faithfulness to tradition and convention,” according to his long-time friend Henry Adams.

The story of his birth and education reads somewhat romantically to-day, though it was only yesterday that he was here. His father as a young man was an officer in the French navy and had been sent to Santo Domingo, during an uprising there, to seize Toussaint the revolutionist. The enterprise went against him, but he escaped the general massacre that followed and eventually found himself a refugee in the United States. He did not return to France, but instead went into sugar-growing in Louisiana,acquired property in New York, and married there a daughter of M. Binsse de St. Victor, a Santo Domingo sugar-planter, who, like himself, had been driven from the island by the uprising under Toussaint. These French refugees were La Farge’s parents and he, himself, was born in Beach Street, near St. John’s Church, in 1835. The house was in what has latterly been called old New York and La Farge never entirely got out of that quarter. During his life he did not live above Tenth Street.

His parents were very cultivated people and as a boy La Farge’s education was precisely guided. His father was a rather severe type and instilled rugged principles. He was a good teacher, and the pupil was brought up to do exact thinking. In his reading he was not permitted to roam at large. He tells us in his letters and communications to Mr. Cortissoz, whose admirable account I am paraphrasing,[8]that as a child he read French and English, read St. Pierre, Rousseau, Bossuet, Homer, De Foe, Voltaire—certainly an odd lot of authors for childish consumption. The house was full of books—Molière, Racine, Corneille, Cervantes, Byron—some of them illustrated with handsome Turneresque engravings, which no doubt had quite as much influence on the boy as the printed texts. The outlook of his parents waslarge and La Farge grew up in an atmosphere of liberal ideas.

[8]John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study, by Royal Cortissoz, Boston, 1911.

As for the house, he speaks of it as being “really very elegant” and regarding the pictures on the walls, he says:

“The influences which I felt as a little boy were those of the paintings and the works of art that surrounded me at home.” There were examples in the house of Vernet, Le Moyne, Salvator Rosa, Sebastiano del Piombo, many Dutch pictures, particularly “a beautiful Salomon Rysdael.” “It so happened that my very first teachings were those of the eighteenth century and my training has covered almost a century and a half.”

At six he had wished to draw and paint, and was handed over to his maternal grandfather to be taught. The grandfather had been ruined by his Santo Domingo losses, and in his age had no other resource than to fall back upon the polite learning he had acquired in his youth. He took up miniature painting and gave drawing lessons because, as La Farge explained it, “it was in the family.”

“On a small scale he was an exquisite painter. He was also a good teacher and started me at six years old in the traditions of the eighteenth century.... The teaching was as mechanical as it could be and was rightly based upon the notion that a boy ought to be taught so as to know his trade. There was not the slightest alleviation and no suggestion of this being ‘art.’”

He was taught to sharpen crayons, to fasten paper, to draw parallel lines, and produce a tint. Gradually he came to copy such things as engravings. The work became more interesting, and at eight he could do something that had resemblance to an original. Later he copied everything that came to hand and was free to do as he pleased.

In the meantime his general education was not neglected. His grandmother Binsse de St. Victor had opened a school for young ladies which was very successful. La Farge as a boy took lessons under her, and in his reminiscences recalls the severity of his drilling in eighteenth-century French. He got English from an English governess, and some German from an Alsatian nurse. Then came books and school and the dreariness of lessons on dry themes. He was sent to Columbia Grammar School, passed into Columbia College, changed over to Fordham, and finally, in 1853, graduated at Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland.

He recalls that during his school-days there was much reading of history, literature, and archæology. In English his professor led him to read Newman and Ruskin—the two great masters of style, though the one was classic and the other romantic. In French there was De Musset, Balzac, Heine. He was familiar with Greek and Latin—he could not have graduated from a Catholic college without knowing Latin—and had early gone over the classical writersin the original languages. As for art, he studied engravings of Dürer and lithographs of the old masters. “An English water-color painter had been found who gave me thoroughly English lessons.” After college days he got lessons from a French artist. In later life, looking at his drawings made in the early fifties, he thought them “respectable.” “They were largely based on line and construction, which of course gives a basis of seriousness.”

After graduation he entered a lawyer’s office and began studying law, though he still held his interest in art. Some pictures of the men of 1830 were beginning to come into the country and he recalls buying for a few dollars a Diaz, a Troyon, and a Bargue, and his delight in them. He met artists like Inness, talked art and thought much about it, but he was not yet prepared to embrace it for better or worse. In 1856, when he was twenty-one, he went to Europe, not minded even then to study art professionally, but merely wishing travel for travel’s sake and to be for a time a looker-on.

He went directly to Paris and joined his cousin, Paul Binsse (or Bins), Comte de St. Victor, who was just then holding prominent place in literary and journalistic Paris. The cousin was writing in a brilliant style dramatic, literary, and art criticism forLe Pays,La Presse, andLa Liberté, and publishing books such asHommes et Dieux,Barbares et Bandits,Les Dieux et lesDemi-Dieux de la peinture. He was in association with the Goncourts, Sainte-Beuve, Théophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Flaubert—all the great gods of little Paris. The father, Jacques Benjamin Maximilien Binsse, Comte de St. Victor, had had a literary and artistic vogue before the son. He had been the editor ofLa Franceand theJournal des Débats, had written for the stage and the opera, and was the author of numerous books of poetry, archæology, and history. He was still alive and flourishing when La Farge reached Paris, and his house was open to the young man from America. It was the house of a collector of paintings; the most famous artists and literary men met there; there was much comment and criticism in the air—much roaring of the lions. La Farge was in the midst of it. As he expressed it: “Art and literature were there at my hand, in rather an ancient form, but with the charm of the past, the eighteenth century, and the wonderful beginning of the nineteenth.”

The great uncle was in sympathy with the classic and the academic, stood up for David and Guérin, and looked askance at everything new; but the cousin, Paul de St. Victor, was the champion of the younger men. La Farge was between two fires in the home and listened to both sides when he went abroad. He met Gérôme, then a young man, frequented the house of Chasseriau, heard much of the controversybetween Ingres and Delacroix. He never met Delacroix, but was profoundly impressed by his works. He was also much impressed at this early time by the glass in the Paris churches, and during a trip to Brussels met Henry Le Strange, who had decorated Ely Cathedral, and through him became interested in methods of mural painting.

The father in America thought that his son was wasting his time and wrote him urging that he take up art seriously. The result was that La Farge went to Couture’s studio and had a talk with the master. He did not even then think of art as a profession, and wanted from Couture not so much technical education as general education in art. He spent only two weeks in the studio and then set about copying the drawings of the old masters in the Louvre. Presently he went to Munich and afterward to Dresden, copying in each place more of the drawings of the old masters. He thought this a logical and very serious way of learning art. And so it was. In copying the drawings he got at the understructure whereas in the paintings he got only the surface. La Farge from first to last was always seeking the logical, philosophical, and scientific bases of things. And meanwhile thereby

“I kept in touch with that greatest of all characters of art, style—not the style of the academy or any one man, but the style of allthe schools, the manner of looking at art which is common to all important personalities, however fluctuating its form may be.”

In Copenhagen he made a copy of a Rembrandt.

“I was enabled to learn a great deal of the methods of Rembrandt and to connect them with my studies.... Rubens I followed in Belgium, trying to see every painting of his throughout the whole kingdom and as many of his pupils’ as I could gather in.”

He had an admiration for the severe training of Rubens and for his later prodigal expenditure of energy and paint on canvas. In the autumn of 1857-1858 he was studying Titian, Velasquez, and many others of the famous masters at the Manchester Exhibition in England. There also he saw and studied the Preraphaelite painters and became acquainted with several of them.

“They made a very great and important impression upon me, which later influenced me in my first work when I began to paint.”

When La Farge returned to New York (his father’s illness had hastened his return) nothing as to art had been decided upon and no method of painting had been definitely learned. He had had a unique and very wonderful experience for a young man, had gathered up much information, and perhaps unconsciously had developed an inquiring attitude of mind. This latter became his habitual attitude; he was always contemplative,meditative, disposed to question. Perhaps that is the reason why he still hesitated about embracing art as a profession. At any rate, he went back to the study of law, though not forsaking his interest in painting and architecture. The following year he took a room in the Tenth Street Studio Building, where he was accustomed to go to make little drawings and paint “in an amateurish way.” He recognized that he needed technical training and once more thought of returning to Europe to get it.

In 1859 he went to Newport to study painting under William M. Hunt, whose methods he did not altogether like, though he was fond of the man. Hunt was then devoted to Jean François Millet, and, through Hunt, La Farge came to know that painter’s work. He copied two or three of Millet’s pictures but could not accept him wholly any more than he could Hunt. The truth was that even then La Farge was an original and would follow no one. He could not abide recipes for doing or making things, though eventually he invented a recipe of his own and followed that.

At Newport he did some landscapes looking through a window to show the difference in light between the inside and the outside. It was for educative purposes, not for picture-making. In the same way he painted flowers in a vase at haphazard, or did the corner of a table,with no idea of composition but merely to get acquainted with all phases of light, texture, and surface. The next year he was back in New York, painting was temporarily abandoned, and presently he departed for Louisiana. He could not, however, keep away from painting wherever he went, and he soon returned to New York to start a picture of St. Paul Preaching for the Church of the Paulists. With John Bancroft he next took up the question of light and color, then being investigated by scientific men. That, he declares, had an important influence on his later work. But probably the event that definitely decided him for an art career was his marriage in 1860 to Miss Margaret Brown Perry, a great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin.

I have helped myself largely to Mr. Cortissoz’s book (for which I am sure he will not quarrel with me) regarding these educational happenings of La Farge’s early days, because they point to an unusual acquaintance with philosophic, literary, and artistic traditions. La Farge was saturated with them at twenty-two. His education was extraordinary when compared with his American contemporaries—Inness, Wyant, Martin, Homer. He had found himself before he was thirty and knew what he wanted to say and do, whereas Homer at sixty was still uncertain and groping. Art had come to La Farge almost as a child learns to talk,that is, unconsciously, without great effort. The formulas had been largely thought out for him and he had merely to accept them. With Inness, Wyant, and Martin it was necessary to make their own formulas, work out their own philosophy, establish their own premises. And that, too, after they had come to man’s estate. La Farge had a great advantage over them. He was not only born to art but had it thrust upon him. With his fine natural endowments of mind and eye it is not, perhaps, remarkable that he afterward was able to achieve art in a large way and in more than one department.

But he did not rest content with his early experiences. He took up new problems and remained a student to his latest day. His mental curiosity was remarkable. He was always trying to get at the cause or sequence of things. I remember very well arguing at him one day, with undue vehemence perhaps, about some question of the hour, and hearing his quiet answer that it made no difference which of us was right, but that we should go along together and try to get at the truth. That was his Gallic cast of mind. He had no wish or care to put the other fellow in the wrong, and as for disputatious argument, it was not intellectually good form. In this respect Ruskin had amused and vexed him during his early years. The great critic was not only wrong in matter but in the method of presenting it. Fromentin, onthe contrary, pleased him much. The French critic’s mind was of the same order as his own.

La Farge had evidently heard of Japanese art in Paris, for in 1863 he began collecting Japanese prints, sending directly to Japan for them. He records that he imported at that time many for himself and his friend Bancroft. He was interested not only in their linear patterns but in their color relations, particularly as shown in landscape. He was painting landscapes at this time and working out-of-doors.

“My programme was to paint from nature a portrait and yet to make distinctly a work of art which should remain as a type of the sort of subject I undertook.”

Almost the whole of his theory of art lies in that sentence. It will apply to his painting of water-lilies as well as to his figures or landscapes. He was after a type of the species—something typical and universal rather than something odd or singular. Perhaps the most notable result of his theory and practice at this time was the landscape called “Paradise Valley,” painted between 1866 and 1868.

The material for the “Paradise Valley” was found along the Rhode Island coast near Newport. It is a bare, almost treeless, scene, looking down toward the sea, and is cut up somewhat in the middle distance by the angle lines of stone fences. There is nothing about it of “the view,” nothing that a Hudson River painter wouldhave looked at the second time; yet La Farge added beauty to its bare truth in such degree that it became a masterpiece. All of the painter’s studies in light and line were put into it and yet kept from attracting too much attention in the exposition. And all of the infinite variety of tone and color common to the Atlantic shore landscape were added and blended together as one. The type as a whole emerged—the universal came out of the commonplace. A more perfect piece of work, a more beautiful picture of landscape, had not then, and has not since, been produced in American art. Of its kind it is unequalled.

valleyCopyright by John La Farge.“Paradise Valley,” by John La Farge.In the Collection of General Thornton K. Lothrop.(click image to enlarge)

“Paradise Valley,” by John La Farge.

In the Collection of General Thornton K. Lothrop.(click image to enlarge)

The last time I saw this landscape was many years ago at an exhibition in the gallery of the Century Club. It held the place of honor on the wall, and I was looking at it, praising it unstintedly to a friend standing beside me. After I had exhausted my adjectives, I became aware of some one in the room behind me. I turned and saw La Farge standing there. Whether or not he had overheard me I did not know, but there being nothing to conceal, I told him just what I had been saying to my companion. He smiled and bowed and seemed greatly pleased. He was always too polite to question the compliments of his admirers, and much too broadminded to scoff at praise, however unintelligent he might think it. But the point of my story is further along.

After his telling me how he came to paint the landscape and what he had sought to make out of it, I asked him why he had not continued with work of that kind—why he had not painted more Paradise Valleys. His answer was that he had done a number of landscapes similar in character but that no one seemed to care for them. There was no audience, no demand for them, and, worst of all, no one would buy them. He was forced to do something that would produce a revenue. That seemed to me at the time deplorable, but perhaps it was not all sheer loss to art, for his lack of pecuniary success with easel pictures probably had much to do with his taking up mural decoration and glass-work.

With a select public, however, La Farge had already won recognition. His landscapes and flower pictures—especially the latter with their lovely color, texture, and surface, and that indefinable feeling that is La Farge—met with appreciation from artists and amateurs. The Academy of Design elected him to its membership, and, a little later, a firm of Boston publishers began publishing some of his illustrations made for Browning’s poems. He had planned some three hundred drawings for Browning, and for an edition of the Gospels many more. These were La Farge’s romantic days, and the influences of French romanticism intellectually and his Japanese prints technically were ratherstrong with him. In fancy he was harking back to Greek and mediæval myths, Bible legends, and Arabian Nights tales. But only a few drawings from each field finally found their way into print. They appeared in the oldRiverside Magazineand were accounted very effective, even after the engraver had translated them. Every one who has written about La Farge has devoted a page or so to an analysis of his “Wolf Charmer” and “Piper of Hamelin.” Criticised they were for what has been declared faulty construction and drawing but never for their lack of life. They were excellent examples of naturalistic drawing wherein accuracy is often sacrificed to vitality. But the telling quality of the illustrations was not so much their technique as their imagination. La Farge had inner as well as outer vision, and the conception of the wolf charmer, for example, as half-wolf himself, gnawing rather than playing his pipe, was perhaps the better part of its excellence.

But illustration was to engage his attention for only a short period. He was interested in things of larger decorative significance. Describing one day some work of art that I cannot now recall he used the word “decorative” and I remember his pausing and saying rather emphatically in parenthesis: “And when I say decorative, I am saying about the best thing I can about a picture.” Imagination he had in abundance, but perhaps it was manifestedstronger in the light and color of his decorations than in such literary readings as the “Wolf Charmer.” His glass was the finest flight in color of modern times. It remains so to this day. The same creative sense of hue on a large scale was shown in his mural work. His panels and lunettes have their individual meaning and their imaginative presentation of the type, but these are only parts of a whole which carries again by its decorative color sweep.

His first wall decorations were those for Trinity Church, Boston, in 1876. They were done under time pressure in less than six months—done in winter with open windows and everybody clad in overcoats and gloves. Ten or a dozen painters worked under him and with him, among them Frank Millet, Francis Lothrop, and George Maynard. It was the first attempt in America to do church decoration on a large scale with a group of painters directed by one head. The unusual conditions and requirements limited its success, and yet it was quickly recognized as being an initial step of much importance and La Farge was acclaimed as the leader of the new order. Thereafter commissions for churches, public buildings, and private houses came to him and did not cease to come up to his death. He at first did panels for the Church of the Incarnation, decorations for St. Thomas’s Church, afterward destroyed by fire, and for the Reid house in New York; in his late years hepainted great lunettes for the capitol at St. Paul. Perhaps the climax of these wall-paintings is the picture of the “Ascension” set up on the chancel wall of the Church of the Ascension, in New York. It is his chief work, and is picture-making, wall-painting, and church decoration all in one.

The “Ascension” had its origin in one of La Farge’s drawings for a western chapel. It was enlarged to meet the new need by putting in at the back a high and wide mountain landscape. The architectural place for it was simplified by placing on the chancel wall of the church a heavily gilded moulding, deep-niched, and with an arched top which acted at once both as a frame and a limit to the picture. The space was practically that of a huge window with a square base and a half-circle top requiring for its filling two groups of figures one above the other. La Farge placed his standing figures of the apostles and the holy women in the lower space and their perpendicular lines paralleled the uprights of the frame; at the top he placed an oval of angels hovering about the risen Christ, and, again, the rounded lines of the angel group repeated the curves of the gilded arch.

muse“The Muse,” by John La Farge.In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“The Muse,” by John La Farge.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There was no great novelty in this arrangement. It was frankly adopted from Italian Renaissance painting and had been used for high altar-pieces by all the later painters—Andrea del Sarto, Raphael, Titian, Palma. They hadworked out the best way of filling that upright-and-arched space, and La Farge followed the tradition because he recognized its sufficiency. But when all that is said it should be added that his “Ascension” is no close following of Italian example. The grouping is different and the setting is quite the opposite of the Italian. This is an open-air Ascension, not a studio-lighted gathering of academic figures posed merely to repeat each other’s linear contours. The apostles stand in a great valley plain with mountains at the sides and back. They standin, notout, of the landscape. The angels are in a huge floating oval about the risen Christ. What beautiful moving circling figures they are! With what superb recognition of light, air, and space they are given! And how they hold their exact place in relation to the background and to the figures below them! All of La Farge’s knowledge and skill came into play in painting these two groups that contrast with and yet complete each other. They are his highest achievement in figure-painting. It may be merely provincial pride that makes one think they do not suffer by comparison with the groups of the great Italians, yet there are intelligent people who believe that.

But after one has studied and wondered over these figures, he begins to look further, and finally comes to question if the enveloping landscape is not the more beautiful part of the picture.No such landscape was ever painted by any old master, not even by Titian in his “Presentation” picture in the Venice Academy. And thereby hangs a tale. La Farge could not at first get the right landscape for it, and in the middle of the work, that is in 1886, he and his friend Henry Adams went on a long trip to Japan. It was in the mountains of Japan (or was it, perhaps, later in the South Sea islands?) that he saw and sketched the superb landscape that now does service in the background of the “Ascension.” It fitted the figures exactly and is their natural and proper environment. Figures and groups from Italy that are not Italian and landscapes from Japan that are not Japanese blend together perfectly because translated, transmuted, by the genius of La Farge into something that is peculiarly his own type of the Ascension. In such fashion, and of such materials, is great art brought into being.

La Farge’s glass-work carried over the greater part of his artistic life. Mr. Cortissoz tells us that he did several thousand windows of various patterns and designs. For many years, and up to his death, he had a shop in South Washington Square where, with assistants and workmen, the more mechanical part of window construction was carried on. But he looked after every part of it from start to finish. He never let go of his workman, never allowed himself as a designer to be eliminated by turning hisdesign over wholly to the shop. He followed up everything and exacted results while inspiring enthusiasm and intelligence in his men. The result was that the work, in spite of the touch of others, remained peculiarly that of La Farge and bore his individual stamp.

In window-making he tried dozens of different experiments to get depth, variation, and complement of tone by repeated platings of pot-metal glass. As a result he produced brilliant jewel-like glass theretofore never dreamed of. With iridescent and opalescent sheets at hand in countless tones and shades he began the construction of his window, not in patches of color, but with a crayon cartoon, just as he had designed pictures. He made a pattern, filled the spaces rightly, and thought of the colors afterward. The lead lines helped out the design and did not break or block it by haphazard crossings at stated intervals. In other words, his radiant color schemes were every one of them based in design and had a foundation of drawing under them.

“This, then, is a study of line and is different from the notion of some intellectual friends that the line is to be put on afterward.”[9]

[9]La Farge in a letter to Mr. Cortissoz.

And yet there was no attempt to do in glass what could be better done on canvas. The brilliant transparent tones were peculiarly fitted for glass because they could not be squeezedout of a tube or laid down with a brush. I recall seeing in his shop years ago a tall narrow window, done, if I remember rightly, for the Whitney house, showing a robed female figure scattering autumn leaves upon a pool. The brilliant autumn tints, the light from the reflecting water, would have been impossible to render fully with pigments, and the blending of light and air seemed attainable only with La Farge’s delicate opaline glass. It seemed to me at the time a quite wonderful window, and yet he did many of them pitched in the same key of splendor.

In the midst of wall and window decorations La Farge found little time for easel-painting—something he regretted but could not help. Twice, however, he broke away from the shop and went upon long trips. The first was to Japan with Henry Adams in 1886. Out of that came many water-color sketches and drawings, besides a charming book,An Artist’s Letters from Japan. To some the book is of more interest than the drawings. The temple-doors and interiors and Buddhas of his sketches are, no doubt, truthfully illustrative, and that is perhaps their failing as pictures. The model was too apparent and the artist not so much in evidence as could be wished for. His own negative definition of art applies just here: “It is never themere representationof what we see.” Some of the mountain landscapes, however, are very fine,and his garden bits recall the early La Farge of the pond-lilies and the “Paradise Valley.”

valley“The Three Kings,” by John La Farge.In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.(click image to enlarge)

“The Three Kings,” by John La Farge.

In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.(click image to enlarge)

His second long trip was again with Henry Adams and this time to the South Seas. He was gone for a year or more, from 1890 and on, and out of this trip came another engaging book,Reminiscences of the South Seas, besides many water-color drawings. The water-colors were again illustrative, but perhaps they were more animated than the Japanese series, had to do more intimately with the island life, and were often strikingly picturesque in theme and movement. With them came also a number of small sea-pieces showing bays, harbors, and islands done with the greatest simplicity and yet having a satin-and-silk quality about them quite indescribable in its beauty. These silvery sea-pieces are in the same class with La Farge’s early violets and roses—things that are exquisite in their surface texture and their color beauty. His mountain landscapes of the South Seas are again superb in their greens and blues. A love and a gift for landscape always remained with him, and one often wonders, had he devoted himself to this alone, what new revelations of the world about us he might have handed down in art.

The groups of natives in dances or games or ceremonies naturally attract the most attention in the South Seas water-colors. Technically they are interesting because of their hark backto Delacroix. Not only the reds, blues, greens, and flesh notes are like Delacroix, but the drawing of the hands and feet, the movement of arms and legs are much like that master. All his life La Farge had carried that impress about with him. A few years before he died one of his pictures, at an exhibition or sale, was so like a Delacroix that at first, from across the room, I thought it by the great romanticist. Some time later in mentioning the fact to La Farge he nodded his head and said that he had been very much influenced by Delacroix and no doubt unconsciously did things in his style or manner.

To say that one prefers La Farge’s travel books to his travel sketches is not to disparage the sketches, for the books were extraordinarily good. He had a great admiration for Fromentin’sUne Année dans le Sahel, and perhaps that volume had not a little to do in suggesting the form of the volumes on Japan and the South Seas. They are impressionistic in that they record moods, thoughts, and talks that make up a quite perfect text for his sketches. They are both grave and gay, profound and volatile, forceful and yet charming. La Farge had the literary sense quite as much as the pictorial, and had he chosen to make a profession of letters he would perhaps have risen to as great a height as he did in painting.

While a student under Hunt at Newport hebecame well acquainted with Henry James, whom he later on advised to take up literature. In the light of subsequent achievement that must be regarded as good advice, and yet James had the pictorial cast of mind and might have made a fine painter. At any rate, some of his best work in writing was his criticism of painting. La Farge, too, with a mind pictorially inclined, put out some of his best thoughts in a book of art criticism entitledConsiderations on Painting. It was delivered originally as lectures to art students, but it must have shot far over their little heads. It is too profound to be grasped at once and often requires a second reading to apprehend the meaning, but it is the best piece of art criticism put forth in America. In kind and excellence it ranks with Fromentin’sLes Maîtres d’autrefois—the classic of the craft.

Fromentin was about the only writer on art that La Farge cared for. He was kind enough to send me a copy of hisConsiderations on Paintingwhen it was published, and later, in talking over the book with him, he took occasion to remark (as afterward in print) that he had read thousands of pages of art criticism “without finding anything that a person seriously devoted to his profession of art could find of the slightest use.” At the time I ventured to suggest to him that aid to artists was not the object of art criticism, that an attempt to instruct professionals would argue greater knowledge in thecritic than in the artist and be presumptuous, that the critic wrote for the public and thought to be of service by calling attention to and explaining certain things that might otherwise be overlooked or misjudged. Moreover, it was suggested that the writer, too, had his design and pattern in words which he was trying to work out artistically and decoratively, and that the subject, whether criticism, history, poetry, or fiction, was of as little importance with him as with the painter. Ruskin in art criticism, Newman in sermons and lectures, and Carlyle in history and essay were possibly greater artists than Dickens and Thackeray in fiction.

There was nothing new about that to La Farge, but he acquiesced in it by bowing and smiling a little, especially over Ruskin, for whom he came as near having contempt as for any one. Not only Ruskin’s ideas but his vehemence of style were not to La Farge’s fancy. He wrote in no such hectic vein in hisConsiderations on Painting. The whole treatise is an inquiry, not an argument, and through it all you feel the evenly poised, well-balanced mind that is weighing the question and is not to be stampeded by rhetoric or eloquence of any kind. He was too intelligent for enthusiasm or emotion. He thought out everything very calmly, and in the midst of conviction often doubted or questioned his own conclusions. It was his normal attitude of mind—a mind that indulged in subtleties, that saw as many meanings in a problem as a rug-weaver’seye sees colors in a pattern of tapestry. It was the attempt to put these subtleties in parenthesis that sometimes makes hisConsiderations on Paintinghard reading, and yet no one would wish them deleted. They are side-lights that illumine the quest. The book is an epitome of La Farge’s method of thinking and is a type of its kind in literature as truly as his “Paradise Valley” is a type in painting.

As for the philosophic mind, he practically describes himself in one passage in an article inScribner’s Magazine[10]on the “Teaching of Art.” It is worth quoting:

“The noblest of all the gifts of the great institutions of learning is a certain fostering of elevation of mind. It is not so much by what he knows that the man brought under the trainings of the great academies is marked; it is by his acquaintance with the size of knowledge; with, if I may say so, the impossibility of completing its full circle; with the acquaintance of the manners of enlarging his boundaries; with the respect of other knowledge than his own; with a certain relative humility as compared with the narrower pride of him who knows not the size of the spaces of the world of knowledge. And such an attitude of mind, such an elevation above petty prides, such a belief in something larger than one’s self, such an openness to the world, is the privilege of a full artistic development.”

[10]Scribner’s Magazine, vol. 64, page 181.

La Farge as a painter, as an inventor of preciousglass, as an illustrator of Oriental life, as a writer of books, was a great success; as a student, a man of learning, a philosopher and a talker he was not less so. He had been born of cultivated parents and all his life had been saturated with the intellectual. He knew how to think, weigh, and judge matters, and he knew how to express himself in paint, in letters, and in words. His mental poise was remarkable for its stability, though he was not stubborn and was always open to new light. His conversation was serious, and his manner grave, courteous, calm as that of a French academician. Certain eccentricities—mental habits that indicated the questioner—were peculiar to him, and Henry Adams, his travelling companion, was led to speak of him as a wonderful mind and a wonderful contradiction. By that, perhaps he meant that La Farge always stopped short of the positive conclusion. He guarded himself with qualifying clauses, as though conscious of another side to the question.

His talk was quite as delightful as his books. He had read almost everything, knew almost every one in the modern art world, and his fund of information seemed as exhaustless as his charm of manner. And yet withal he was rather a shy man and had to be sought out. For many years he dined regularly at the Century Club, and more often alone than with company. If any one sat opposite to him at his little table,the chances were two to one that the visitor was self-invited. He held as intimates for many years Clarence King, John Hay, and Henry Adams. They must have proved a rare quartet of wits around a dinner-table, for all of them were exceptionally brilliant talkers. But I never heard of a fifth at the table.

Honors had come to La Farge from the beginning. He had received medals and prizes and degrees, he wore the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole, was president of the Society of American Artists, and an initial member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He took them all very calmly. They were recognitions that he did not despise; neither did he count them as crowns of glory. His well-poised mind, with its Oriental sympathies, could rise above praise, and yet he was human enough to like it. When the gold medal of the Architectural League was presented to him he startled the honor-bearers by suggesting that it was late in coming. That was not so much egotism as the bald truth, and he could not refrain from pointing it out.

La Farge had never been physically robust, and during his latter years he had known much illness. There were periods when he was totally incapacitated and could do no more than lie still. He took that calmly, too. He was a philosopher always and made the best of things. Perhaps that is the reason why with his frail body helived on to seventy-four, not dying until November, 1910. He lived his character to the last, and when he died the painter-world, if no other, knew that a master mind as well as a master craftsman had passed out.

In the arts he was our first great scholar and spoke as one having authority. With his learning, his imagination, and his skill he gave rank to American art more than any other of the craft. For that reason he is to-day hailed as master and written down in our annals as belonging with the Olympians. He deserves the title and the separate niche.

Back to Index Next