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John La Farge Exhibition John La Farge JOHN LA FARGE EXHIBITION JOHN LA FARGE THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART AN EXHIBITION OF THE WORK OF JOHN LAFARGE NEW YORK MARCH 23 TO APRIL 26, 1936 COPYRIGHT BY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART MARCH, 1936 J CO ^ LIST OF LENDERS Addison Gallery of American Art Miss Marian L. Blake Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss Brooklyn Museum Carnegie Institute Century Association Mrs. Algernon Coolidge Thornton Coolidge Mrs. G. S. Curtis William Emerson Fogg Art Museum Edward W. Forbes Otto Weir Heinigke William M. Ivins, Jr. Miss La Farge Mr. and Mrs. Bancel La Farge Christopher La Farge Robert Laurent Miss Mary B. Lothrop Professor and Mrs. Roger B. Merriman Museum of Fine Arts, Boston National Gallery of Art, Washington Mrs. Edgar Phelps Mrs. M. Bernard Philipp Mrs. John Briggs Potter Mrs. Ogden Reid Dr. William H. Smith Mrs. Richard L. Stokes Mrs. Bayard Thayer Mrs. Roger S. Warner Miss Mary C. Wheelwright Whitney Museum of American Art Worcester Art Museum Three Anonymous Lenders VI PREFACE John La Farge was born, in New York, in 1835 and died in 1910. In giving an exhibition of his work a hundred years after his birth, the Metropolitan Museum hopes to recapture for a brief time some of the spirit of a leader of American art throughout the late nineteenth century, and something of the atmosphere of the first period of the Museum's own existence. In his day La Farge held a unique preeminence as a painter, as a mural decorator, as a designer of stained glass, and as an illustrator of books, and with his unusual gifts as lecturer and writer he exerted an inspiring influence on contemporary American aesthetic thought. It is a memorable fact, in this last respect, that he was one of the committee which planned The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1869-1870. It was in the Mu­ seum that he delivered the lectures which were published in 1895 as Considerations on Painting. The special thanks of the Museum are tendered to the va­ rious owners who have so generously and kindly made this exhibition possible by lending from their collections for the occasion. In discovering the present whereabouts of works available for the exhibition and in choosing the most representative of them, the Museum owes a very real debt to C. Grant La Farge, the artist's son, to Henry La Farge, his grandson, to Augustus Vincent Tack, one of his pupils, and to Royal Cortissoz, his vii friend and biographer. And particularly does the Museum— and the public—owe unqualified gratitude to Royal Cortissoz for his appreciation of the artist in the following pages. No present-day writer is better qualified to tell what John La Farge meant to his own generation than one who, having sat at his feet, knew him intimately, appreciated his genius sym­ pathetically, and became so familiar with his thought that he can choose unerringly from his writings and his remembered conversations the most revealing phrases. H. E. WINLOCK, Director. vin CONTENTS PAGE LIST OF LENDERS PREFACE Vll CONTENTS lX JOHN LA FARGE 1 ILLUSTRATIONS 17 JOHN LA FARGE One summer afternoon in Paris, long ago, I tried to interest Ary Renan, then editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, in cer­ tain American artists. He was polite but bewildered. The son of the great Ernest, he was by inheritance and training a man of wide cultivation. Himself a painter and at the head of the leading art magazine of the world, he might have been ex­ pected to know something about artists everywhere. But when I talked to him about George Inness and Winslow Homer, about Abbott Thayer, George De Forest Brush, and Thomas W. Dewing, about Alden Weir and John H. Twachtman, he was as unresponsive as a graven image. Then suddenly all was changed. I spoke of La Farge and Renan's face came to life. Yes, he knew about La Farge. He was a little hazy on the pic­ tures and decorations. But he was fervid about the glass. The Watson Memorial window, shown in the Paris Exposition in 1889, had won for La Farge a medal of the first class, the rib­ bon of the Legion of Honor, and this tribute from the jury: "His work cannot be fully gauged here, where a single win­ dow represents a name the most celebrated and widely known in our Sister Republic. He is the great innovator, the inventor of opaline glass. He has created in all its details an art un­ known before, an entirely new industry, and in a country with­ out tradition he will begin one followed by thousands of pupils filled with the same respect for him that we have ourselves for 1 2 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART our own masters. To share in this respect is the highest praise that we can give to this great artist." I recall these matters because they point so vividly to what was one of the most important elements in the character and career of La Farge, his spiritual alliance with Europe and European tradition. It differed from anything previously or later known in our artistic annals. Generations before him the American portrait painter had derived impetus from the eighteenth-century British school, transcending its formula, to be sure, as in the case of Gilbert Stuart, when he had genius, but otherwise confessing a debt. In the later decades of the nineteenth century our young men were to go in throngs to Paris and acquire at Julian's and amongst the masters of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts the disciplinary habits of the French technician. La Farge, in the long story of the American artist abroad, occupies a place apart. He imbibed there not a formu­ la, not a technical system, but the spirit of a civilization, a stimulus reacting upon traits implanted in him at his birth. His father, Jean Frederic de la Farge, had known the perils of the Revolution in France and served as an ensign in the naval expedition sent under General Leclerc to subjugate Tous- saint at Santo Domingo. He had divers thrilling adventures there and ultimately just escaped the historic massacre. It was as a refugee that he landed in the United States in 1806, reach­ ing Philadelphia but presently settling in New York. He was an energetic, resourceful man, went into business, acquired much real estate, and altogether prospered. It was for him, by the way, that La Fargeville, near Watertown, New York, was named. He married the daughter of M. Binsse de Saint-Victor, JOHN LA FARGE 3 a member of the old regime who had had plantations in Santo Domingo. The La Farges lived at 40 Beach Street, about mid­ way between the Battery and Washington Square, when the future painter was born on March 31, 1835. I had La Farge's collaboration when I was writing his biography and he communicated to me many things. One of them was his appreciation of the neighborhood in which he was reared. "We must always remember that this is old New York," he would say of the scene of his boyhood, and part of the spell it laid upon him sprang from his own household, where life went on at a pace more characteristic of the eight­ eenth century than of the nineteenth. His home was French, Roman Catholic, and liberal in sentiment. He had an Alsatian nurse and a High-Church English governess and was strictly trained in the language which it was his destiny chiefly to use. But, he said, he was "always severely held up on French and I still have good eighteenth-century French as one of my posses­ sions." There were English writings in his father's library, but most of the books were French—Moliere, Voltaire, and so on— and he was an avid reader of them. He once wrote me this note on the interieur in which he grew up: "The influences which I felt as a little boy were those of the paintings and works of art that surrounded me at home. Some reached further back than the early Napoleonic period, the beginning of the nineteenth century. There were on the walls a sea piece by Vernet; some imitation historical story, that of Daniel, charming, however, in color, by Lemoyne; two great battle scenes, now ascribed to Salvator; a large painting of Noah and his sons, ascribed to Sebastiano del Piombo; some, indeed many, Dutch paintings of various authors and excel- 4 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART lence, among them a beautiful Solomon Ruysdael which I yet see occasionally. All this and the very furniture and hangings of the Empire parlor did not belong to the Victorian epoch in which I was growing up. "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." It was a training that in its initial stages, according to the conventional story of an artist's life, ought immediately to have marked out his vocation, but while he was wanting to draw and paint at the age of six he defined this impulse as "a mere boy's wish" and I have never discovered anything about him suggestive of decisive precocity. Those earliest studies of his, pursued under the guidance of his maternal grandfather, a fairly accomplished miniaturist, seem to have constituted a rather unexciting diversion, such as any lad might practice. "Gradually," however, he says, "the work became more inter­ esting, and by the time I was eight years old I could begin to do something that had a certain amount of careful resemblance to an original." Then came the distractions of his scholastic education, first at the Grammar School of Columbia, after­ wards at St.
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