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. John's College at Fordham, and finally at Mt. St. Mary's College, Emmitsburg, Maryland, from which he was graduated in 1853. Shortly afterwards his interest in art re­ vived, especially where the Barbizon group was concerned, but his plans for the future remained unformed. For a little while he was occupied in a lawyer's office! Early in 1856 he went abroad. "Europe," he said, "was to be a manner of amuse­ ment, and, for me, of taking up also some family connections." JOHN LA FARGE 5

In Paris, through association with his kinsfolk, the Saint- Victors, he was to plunge into the vortex of things artistic and to be set, though hardly knowing it, upon the path he was to follow until he died. In his prime, when I first knew him, he liked to renew the memories of that varicolored world, in which he was "young and light-headed and happy." Classicism and romanticism were dramatically in conflict. At Chasseriau's, where La Farge was a frequent visitor, "the war raged all the time. At once one was asked what one held in regard to M. Ingres or M. Dela­ croix, for the head of the house had been a favorite pupil of Ingres, a promise of the right academic future, and then had been converted suddenly, like Paul, to Delacroix, for whom he professed, rightly, an extraordinary admiration." I gather that he was a somewhat aloof observer of the battlefield. That was partly a matter of temperament, of his growing and in the long run incurable passion for looking all around a question; and, besides, he was very busy, traveling about to visit relatives, getting, prophetically, interested in the glass in French church­ es, and, under the wing of an English artist, Henry Le Strange, studying the methods of the Flemish Primitives. It was Le Strange who taught him how to paint in wax. The instincts of a vocation must have been stirring in him, though when he entered for a brief period the studio of Couture he amazed that individual by explaining that he "was doing this as a study of art in general and had no intention of becoming a painter." He had a piquant recollection of this interlude. Puvis de Chavannes came to Couture's studio one day looking for a model and chose La Farge. We used to wonder if a pile of photographs from the master's works would reward a 6 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

search after the figure, which La Farge had forgotten. He did not stay long under his chosen mentor but went off upon travels in Germany and Denmark, making drawings from the old masters on the way and, at Copenhagen, copying in water color Rembrandt's Supper at Emmaus. The most characteris­ tic fragment relating to these wanderings is one in which he writes, apropos of his study of the drawings of the old masters: "Meanwhile, thereby, I kept in touch with that greatest of all characters of art, style, not the style of the Academy or of any one man, but the style of all the schools, the manner of look­ ing at art which is common to all important personalities, how­ ever fluctuating its form may be." He was himself forming not a style, in the narrow sense, but a habit of mind, strongly philosophical. It is, I think, a signal testimony to the originality and largeness of his outlook, for all his youth, that he emerged from this European experience without having definitely entered any camp. On his way home he visited England and saw the famous Manchester Exhibi­ tion. He made a sketch of the "Rokeby Venus" of Velazquez there and always remembered the picture with appreciation, but he did not become a disciple of the Spanish master. In London he saw something of the Pre-Raphaelites—Rossetti, whom he thought the biggest man of them all, Ford Madox Brown, and Burne-Jones—and he felt that they influenced him "in my first work when I began to paint." But though it was with a head full of ideas and impressions, it was, on the whole, with a singularly "clean slate" that he came home in the win­ ter of 1857-1858.

"Painting is, more than people think," he once said to me, JOHN LA FARGE 7

"a question of brains." A sound technique he took for granted, as an obligation assumed by the artist in the nature of things. The painter, in his opinion, was bound to know his trade, as a matter of conscience. But art, for him, went far deeper than mere manual dexterity, and even that was conditioned by intel­ lectual processes. In one of his lectures given at the Metropoli­ tan Museum in 1893, assembled in the book called Considera­ tions on Painting, he had this to say: "After all, remember that what I tell you is the result of life, whether in thought or in action; and that I am only able to give principles and founda­ tions for thinking, through having visited certain regions of thought, through surprises that have fallen upon me, and that what confidence I have to-day in talking to you is based on no a priori certainty that I had it all before beginning." It is a profession of faith made by an essentially reflective experi­ mentalist. A lot of brain stuff went into his work, regardless of subject, into a flower piece or landscape as well as into a grand mural decoration. He took a room in the Tenth Street Studio Building, made a few drawings, and "even tried to paint on a small and ama­ teurish scale." These ventures only served to show him that he needed more training, and for a moment he dallied with the idea of going back to Europe to get it. Instead he settled down at Newport in the spring of 1859 under William Hunt, to whose "general influence" rather than to whose particular method he would always cheerfully admit his indebtedness. His first "distinctive paintings" at this time were landscapes. Referring to two of them, in the Gardner and Van Home col­ lections, he said: "They are each studies out of the window to give the effect and appearance of looking out of the window 8 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART and our not being in the same light as the landscape. And also to indicate very exactly the time of day and the exact condition of the light in the sky." Thus early was he lured by the phe­ nomena of light, as a realist keen upon securing the last elusive nuance of his subject. Of the other pictures he executed at this time he says: "I painted flowers to get the relation be­ tween the softness and brittleness of the flower and the hard­ ness of the bowl or whatever it might be in which the flower might be placed. Instead of arranging my subject, which is the usual studio way, I had it placed for me by chance, with any background and any light." He told me that his painting of flowers "was in great part a study; that is, a means of teaching myself many of the difficulties of painting," but so well did he conquer those difficulties, so subtle and so spiritualized was his touch, that there is no one who can dispute his supremacy in this field, unless it be Fantin-Latour, who with all his skill has not quite the same tenderness or depth. Speaking of his flower pictures La Farge said: "Some few were paintings of the water lily, which has, as you know, always appealed to the sense of something of a meaning—a mysterious appeal such as comes to me from certain arrangements of notes of music." His flow­ er pictures make that appeal. He did other things in the sixties, notably a quantity of poetic illustrations to be engraved for The Riverside Magazine. He was enormously pleased when the message reached him that Rossetti liked his Pied Piper of Hamelin. Another incident that he related to me with gusto concerned his drawing of The Wolf Charmer. Years after it was published he met in Japan Hung Ai, a court painter, and that artist exclaimed, "Oh, you are the wolf man!" It is a charming illustration of the persistent JOHN LA FARGE 9 carrying power of a style. But the landmark in this period is the landscape known as Paradise Valley. The French Impres­ sionists were not yet under way in the sixties and were not for a long time to make any impact upon American painting. In this picture La Farge anticipated their plein-airisme and achieved a work of notable significance in color and luminos­ ity. He outlined his purpose as follows: "I undertook a combination of a large variety of problems which were not in the line of my fellow artists here, nor did I know of any one in Europe who at that time undertook them. 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, a subject both novel and 'everydayish.' I therefore had to choose a special moment of the day and a special kind of weather at a special time of the year, when I could count upon the same effect being repeated. I chose a number of difficulties in combination so as to test my acquaint­ ance with them both in theory of color and light and in the practice of painting itself. I chose a time of day when the shad­ ows falling away from me would not help me to model or draw, or make ready arrangements for me, as in the concoc­ tion of pictures usually; and I also took a fairly covered day, which would still increase the absence of shadows. That would be thoroughly commonplace, as we see it all the time, and yet we know it to be beautiful, like most of 'out-of-doors.' I mod­ elled these surfaces of plain and sky upon certain theories of the opposition of horizontals and perpendiculars in respect to color and I carried this general programme into as many small points of detail as possible. I also took as a problem the ques­ tion of the actual size of my painting as covering the surface 10 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

which I really saw at a distance, which would be represented by the first appearance of the picture. A student of optics will understand." In the Paradise Valley and other early landscapes, as in the flower pictures, La Farge gathered up the threads of his genius, his sense of beauty and of truth, his craftsmanship and his style. It was obvious from these works that he had "arrived." They won him honor, and some purchasers. Some of the latter but not enough. Revisiting Europe in the seventies, he found on his return that he had next to no market and played readily enough with a scheme that Paul Durand-Ruel put forth to "make a market" for him in five years or so, just as he was making one for Monet and the rest. One result of the negotia­ tions was a show that the celebrated dealer organized in Lon­ don, La Farge's first real public triumph. He would recall with satisfaction that one of his Newport studies, The Last Valley, held its own between a Rousseau and a Delacroix. Nevertheless his easel pictures did not sell, and even at the time of the Paradise Valley and the prestige it brought him he had "become tempted and then drawn to work in the lines of architecture." He was to do many paintings still on a small scale, in oils and in water color, especially in the course of his Japanese and South Sea travels with Henry Adams. But from his middle years the bulk of his energy was to go into mural decoration and glass.

He drifted into wall painting as he had drifted into his earlier ventures, gradually, under the slow pressure of circum­ stance, but with that cerebral activity of his duly playing its part and somehow helping to equip him for the task attempt- JOHN LA FARGE 11 ed. He and H. H. Richardson were close friends and when the latter was building Trinity Church, in Boston, he asked La Farge to tackle the interior with his brush. The commis­ sion was to be fulfilled against time. "The early part of Sep­ tember, 1876, was the time at which the architect gave me first notice of the work to be done and the first of January was to be the final end." He had to have assistants, of course, but the work remains essentially his, and I remember with what indig­ nation he repelled an impression to the contrary that once got abroad. "It is a bore," he wrote, "but I wish the fact known that I had the charge of ten to fifteen artists, Frank Millet, George Maynard, John Du Fais, Francis Lathrop, Sidney L. Smith, George L. Rose, etc. who did exactly what I wanted as far as they knew how." What he wanted was an organically unified scheme of architectural decoration, and this he secured through the placement of his grand hieratic figures and the arrangement of his more formal passages. There is much to be said about his first achievement in this field, and it would be diverting, for example, to dwell upon the fantastically unfavor­ able conditions amid which the work was carried on and com­ pleted, thanks to an extension of time, in February. But I pre­ fer to touch upon the purely constructive aspect of La Farge's art as a mural painter, his seizure at the very outset upon the law of order and balance which was indispensable to that art. He was to paint many mural decorations—the four spa­ cious lunettes in the room of the Supreme Court in the State Capitol of Minnesota; the panels in the Court House at Balti­ more; the two lunettes for the music room in the Whitelaw Reid house in New York; and The Ascension, his masterpiece, in the church of that name, likewise in New York, to name 12 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

only a few. They all have spiritual and symbolical meaning. And through them all runs the governing influence of tradi­ tion, not in the shape of convention but in that of the born designer's solicitude for the just filling of a given space. I em­ phasize his freedom from convention, from emulation of Veronese or any other specific type. The Ascension may broad­ ly recall Italian precedent but it is primarily an independent, original conception, sustained by La Farge's own imaginative energy. If he remembered Italian tradition he also observed, with respect to his aerial figures, "the people who are swung in ropes and other arrangements across theatres and circuses." He told me how he found his landscape background when he went with Adams to Japan in 1886: "Of course the Judean mountains were entirely out of ques­ tion, all the more that they implied a given place. I kept all this in mind and on one given day I saw before me a space of mountain and cloud and flat land which seemed to me to be what was needed. I gave up my other work and made there­ upon a rapid but very careful study, so complete that the big picture is only a part of the amount of work put into the study of that afternoon. There are turns of the tide which allow you at times to do an amount of work incredible in sober moments; as you know, there are very many such cases; I do not under­ stand it myself. When I returned I was still of the same mind. My studies of separate figures were almost ready and all I had to do was to stretch the canvas and begin the work." It is the creative artist who thus addresses us, and not only the great Ascension but his other mural paintings are, above all else, creative affirmations. Some idea of their singularity may be drawn by comparison of him with his contemporaries JOHN LA FARGE 13

abroad. Paul Baudry was a more brilliant craftsman, but he hadn't such moving things to say nor had he anything like the same range of color. Puvis de Chavannes was the only true rival that he had in his time.

La Farge had no rival at all in the domain of glass, and here, again, he was started upon one of the most fertile paths of his career by something like accident. It occurred, also in the sev­ enties, when, as I have mentioned above, his easel pictures would not sell. To keep the pot boiling, his architectural friend Van Brunt suggested his doing a window for Memorial Hall, at Harvard. He was in the mood for it, partly because recent contact with the Pre-Raphaelites in England had stimulated his interest in glass. He finished the window and was so dissat­ isfied that he destroyed it. For one thing, he told me, good glass was almost unobtainable, even England affording but a limited supply of "palettes." Then, convalescing from an ill­ ness, he happened to glance from his bed at a tooth-powder bottle of cheap colored glass, with the light passing through it. His inventive faculty awoke, and with the aid of a Luxem­ bourg glassmaker whom he routed out in Brooklyn he achieved the "opalescent glass" which was to make him famous. He was launched upon the designing and manufacture of thousands of windows, which were to be strewn all over the country. I would stress once more the element of design, the fact that La Farge's windows were built as parts of an architectural structure. Also they supplied an extraordinarily felicitous out­ let for his ardor as a colorist. He grasped it exultantly and knew that he was its master. He was, with the humility of all great artists, a modest man, but there was something proudly 14 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART victorious about his demeanor in the domain of glass. Henry Adams has recorded how they looked together at glass in 1899, at Chartres and elsewhere. "Even La Farge," he writes, "felt the early glass rather as a document than as a historical emo­ tion, and in hundreds of windows at Chartres and Bourges and Paris, Adams knew barely one or two that were meant to hold their own against a color-scheme so strong as his." I can still recover the emotion that came to me when he asked me to his studio to "see something new" and I beheld the Peacock Window, just completed. It overwhelmed me with its subdued blaze of heavenly color. I realized then, too, what I have felt ever since, that this is more than a window, that it is a creation in glass, an expression of design and color which, like a sculpture or a painting, proclaims the very genius of a medium. Only in glass could he have realized this beautiful conception. With no picture on canvas could he have matched it. It speaks, among other things, of resounding energy, and, apropos, I would ask the reader to consider for a moment the prodigious extent of La Farge's activities. Let him observe the landscapes, flower studies, and figure pieces of the artist's early period, the oils, water colors, and drawings; let him reckon up the paintings of La Farge's maturity, the Eastern and South Sea pictures and sketches, and the great mural decorations; and let him add the countless windows. He will admit, I think, that since the Renaissance there has been no artistic genius more fecund, or more many-sided, than that of La Farge.

Yet he had much else to give forth, in addition to the things touched upon in the foregoing notes. He was the author of six or seven illuminating books, some of them based upon lee- JOHN LA FARGE 15 tures, such as the Considerations on Painting and The Higher Life in Art. He wrote An Artist's Letters from Japan, Great Masters, Reminiscences of the South Seas, One Hundred Mas­ terpieces, and The Gospel Story in Art, books of insight, wis­ dom, and charm. Moreover, he talked. I have heard Whistler talk, brilliantly, but La Farge's talk was more than brilliant, deeper in tone, denser in texture, richer in shadowy nuances, and far more luminous. "In conversation," wrote Henry Adams, "La Farge's mind was opaline with infinite shades and refractions of light, and with color toned down to the finest gradations." In my own experience he seemed to fling out a myriad invisible tentacles of understanding, electric filaments which in an instant identified him with the subject of his thought and made him free of its innermost secrets. He spoke with deliberation, and it was sometimes difficult to follow him. A sentence of La Farge's might carry you almost anywhere before arriving at its goal. But the goal was always reached. The certainty of that consummation was one more of his spells. You watched and waited in absolute security but sometimes a litde breathlessly, for La Farge was a past master of the paren­ thesis and he hated to let go of his collateral lines of thought. The glamour of his talk, of his reveries made articulate, was deepened by the original nature of his personality. In a charac­ teristic attitude of earlier years he stays in my memory as an alert and nervous figure, with hands thrust in his pockets, head jerked back, mouth twisted, and the muscles of his face taut. Later, when he had begun to pay his debt to time, the wonderfully modeled head, with its great brow, sank a litde between the shoulders, and, as he burrowed down into a big chair and gloomed gently at his companion through his wide 16 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART spectacles, he looked like some serene, majestic dignitary mus­ ing in the obscure recesses of an Oriental temple. But for all his high dignity, he was very human, this deep-chested, strong man, six feet tall, very human and full of courage, for he went through his mountainous labors constantly dogged by illness and never faltered. He would have fought in the Civil War if shortsightedness had not disqualified him. Instead he rendered to his time a service which is not to be measured alone by his paintings, his glass, and his books. He was a pervasive influ­ ence among the artists who were his contemporaries, especially his juniors, whom he delighted to aid. For them he came to be a kind of old master, as helpful as he was generous in counsel. In what he did they recognized something beautiful and distinguished, isolated in its period by technical merit and great beauty. In the advice he gave them, whether as to matters of organization or in respect to personal problems, they felt his good will and his sagacity. Saint-Gaudens, early in his career, leaned heavily upon the encouragement of La Farge. It was La Farge who urged Stan­ ford White to be an architect rather than the painter he had thought of becoming. In his old Newport days, when he knew William and Henry James, he divined the latter's vocation as a novelist and told him to adopt the pen in place of the brush. He had a clairvoyant as well as a richly stored mind. With it went the compelling enchantment of the man, a great artist who was a great soul. When he died, on November 14, 1910, he had left his mark. It will not be effaced.

ROYAL CORTISSOZ. ILLUSTRATIONS

The following plates reproduce paintings, stained glass, and water colors, each group arranged in chronological order. The drawings, sketchbooks, woodcuts, and illustrated books (shown in the floor cases), lent by Edward W. Forbes, Otto Weir Heinigke, William M. Ivins, Jr., and two anonymous lenders, have not been illustrated.

1 SELF-PORTRAIT A charming portrait of the youthful artist dated: October 26'27, 1859. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Samuel D. Lee Fund, 1934 2 FIGURE IN A WHITE DRESS The artist's wile, posed in long white draperies. Lent by Miss La Farge 3 WREATH OF FLOWERS A study signed and dated: 1. L. F. MDCCCLXL Lent by Mr. and Mrs. Bancel La Farge 4 FLOWERS IN A BOWL A study signed and dated: J no. La Farge 1861. Lent by Mr. and Mrs. Bancel La Farge 5 FLOWERS BEFORE A WINDOW WITH LANDSCAPE BEYOND The light on the window sill and curtain is interestingly con­ trasted with the dimness of the landscape outside. Lent by Professor and Mrs. Roger B. Mem man 6 WATER LILIES A study dated 1861. Lent by Mrs. Edgar Phelps 7 WATER LILIES A study signed and dated: /. La Farge Oct 7 1862. Lent by Thornton Coolidge 8 WATER LILIES IN A WHITE BOWL The artist was attracted repeatedly by the freshness of water lilies. Lent by Mrs. Roger S. Warnet 9 ANADYOMENE The artist has inscribed on the hack of this lovely little panel: Venus rising from/the Sea/Jno. La Farge. On the front is in­ scribed: L F 1862. Lent by Mrs. Roger S. Warner 10 WOMAN BATHING The classic figure in clinging blue draperies, though small in size, shows the artist's inclination to deal with monumental decoration. It was painted in Newport. Lent by the Worcester Art Museum 11, 12 THE VIRGIN MARY; SAINT JOHN Wings of a triptych begun in 1862-1863 for a Roman Catholic church in New York but not finished. The subjects were used later in the decoration of the Church of Saint Paul the Apostle, New York. Lent by the Whitney Museum of American Art 13 C GRANT LA FARGE AS A CHILD An unfinished study of the artist's eldest child, painted in 1865. Lent by Christopher La Farge 14 PORTRAIT OF A BOY The gravity of youth is sympathetically rendered in this portrait of an unidentified boy. Lent by Mrs. G. S. Curtis 15 NEWPORT BEACH An early study of pearly light over the sea with the foreground in shadow. It is signed and dated: J no. La Farge . . . Aug 1865. The notation of the location is not legible. Lent by Mrs. John Briggs Potter **!"%

16 IDYL—SHEPHERD AND MERMAID The artist has given this pagan tale a lovely form and setting. Lent by the Whitney Museum of American Art 17 STILL LIFE—FISH The artist is known to have painted a set of decorative panels of fish and flowers for a dining room. They were executed in 1865 but were never installed. This panel is dated 1865 and no doubt is one of the set. Lent by Mrs. Richard L. Stores -4^_

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18 PARADISE VALLEY A wide view near Newport, painted about 1868-1869. Although he has maintained throughout a gentle, diffused light, which anticipates to some extent the manner of the Impressionists, La Farge has not blurred the contours or lost the delightful de­ tails of his scene. Lent by Miss Mary B. Lothrop 19 THE MUSE OF PAINTING This painting, dated 1870, shows the artist's feeling for rich color and decorative pattern already well developed and pre­ sages his success with stained glass. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of /. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Walters, 1909 20 VERGIL A decorative representation of the Latin poet seated in a thicket of wild roses and oaks, absorbed by his writing and unaware of the spying girl. Lent by Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss 21 THE HALT OF THE WISE MEN A cool breeze seems to blow over the wide valley as the Magi face the luminous horizon. Lent by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 22 HILLTOP There are dignity and charm about the two ladies of the eighteen-seventies resting under tall pine trees in clear twilight. Lent by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 23 THE VISIT OF NICODEMUS TO CHRIST A replica of the mural in Trinity Church, Boston, done in 1876. The subject was later adapted to a window in the Church of the Ascension, New York. Lent by the National Gallery of Art, Washington 24 DAWN COMES ON THE EDGE OF NIGHT Dawn, with her swirling draperies, is akin to Elihu Vedder's cosmic figures. Lent anonymously 25, 26 DRAMA; MUSIC Mural decorations painted in 1887 for the music room of the house of Whitelaw Reid, Madison Avenue at 50th Street, New York. Lent by Mrs. Ogden Reid 27 SUONATORE A cartoon painted in oil and wax for the lower part of a win­ dow in Trinity Church, Boston. Most of the decoration of the church was executed in 1876, this window in 1887. Lent by the Worcester Art Museum 28 CENTAURESS This glossy mythological creature was painted in 1887. Lent by the Brooklyn Museum 29 MAUA, A SAMOAN A paddler in the ten-oared boat supplied by Chief Seumanu to La Farge for his trips around the islands. Lent by the Addison Gallery of American Art 30 SCENE IN TAHITI A vivid sunset glow lights up the clouds, the far mountain, and the water where a native is spearing fish. The frame, carved in primitive patterns, carries the artist's name. Lent by Robert Laurent 31 ADORATION A monumental figure painted in tempera, originally intended for the Church of Saint Paul the Apostle, New York. Lent by the Brooklyn Museum 32 ADORATION A pendant to the preceding painting. This panel is signed and dated: L F 99. Lent by the Brooklyn Museum 33 BUTTERFLIES AND FOLIAGE A window designed for the house of W. A. White, Columbia Heights, Brooklyn. Lent by William Emerson 34 RED AND WHITE PEONIES A stained-glass window made in 1886 for the house of Alma Tadema, London. It is inscribed on the border: John La Farge's Glass New Yor{ USA. Lent by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 35 LUNETTE A formal design of a vase, a human mask, and grotesques com­ bined with interlacing floral scrolls, made for the house of Cornelius Vanderbilt. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Mrs. Otto Heinig/(e, 1916 36 PEACOCK WINDOW The artist carried out here to the furthest extent his experi­ ments and theories of color in glass. Lent by the Worcester Art Museum I • a

37 THE FISHERMAN AND THE DJINNI After a serious illness in 1866, the artist occupied himself with illustrating fairy tales and poems. Some of them were pub­ lished as woodcuts. Lent by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 38 WILD ROSES AND WATER LILY Two flowers which La barge loved to paint. Lent by Mrs. M. Bernard Philipp 39 WATER LILIES AND PADS Water color has proved here a successful medium for rendering the breathless perfection oi growing lilies. Lent by Mrs. John Briggs Potter 40 WATER LILIES AND BUTTERFLY The arrangement of lilies and drooping foliage suggests La Farge's interest in Far Eastern art. Lent by Mrs. Bayard Thayer 41 SKETCH FOR A MEMORIAL WINDOW—THE THREE MARIES The window was executed in 1889 for the Church of the Ascension, New York. Lent by the Worcester Art Museum jtr. \w~

42 PROSPERITAS A beautiful figure of Plenty designed about L885 for a window on the Staircase oi the house ol Cornelius Vanderbilt, New York. Lent by Otto Weir \\anig\e 43 THE HARVEST In fapan agriculture takes the whole family to the fields. Here sowing, reaping, and threshing are earned on at the same time. Lent by Mrs. Roger S. Winner 44 JAPANESE LANDSCAPE WITH MOUNTAINS La Farge writes in his journal from Japan: "The distant moun­ tains making a great wall lighted up clearly. . . . The city lies in fog, sometimes cool and gray; sometimes golden and smoky." This water color is signed and dated: L F Kioto 86. Lent by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 45 JAPANESE PEASANTS, NEAR SUMADARA An interruption in the journey has been made to sketch the three peasants with their laden, two-wheeled bullock cart. Lent by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 46 STANDING KWANNON CROSSING THE SEA Kwannon is the Japanese name for Kuan Yin, the Chinese Deity of Mercy. It is said that Kwannon visited Hades and was sent across the water by the Regent of Hell to the Lotus Paradise Island of P'u To. Lent anonymously

\A/OTC/ T^»o-rxnn/ £fc*5f-zrv^ 47 RISHI CALLING UP A STORM According to a Japanese belief human beings become rishis, endowed with immortality and magical powers, through medi­ tation, asceticism, and the following of Taoist teachings. Lent by Miss Mary C. Wheelwright 48 PEACOCKS AND PEONIES A study in the old Chinese style for a decorative stained-glass window in the house of Frederick L. Ames, Boston. Lent by Mrs. John Briggs Potter 49 DESIGN FOR THE AMES MEMORIAL WINDOW The upper part of the design has been worked out in great detail, the rest sketched in. The window was erected in the Unitarian Church at North Easton, Massachusetts. Lent by the Fogg Art Museum 50 THE THREE MARIES A study for the mural of the Resurrection executed in 1877 for Saint Thomas's Church, New York, which was destroyed by fire in 1905. Lent by Mr. and Mrs. Bancel La Farge 51 THE PRESENTATION OF GIFTS, SAMOA The kindly Samoans greet visitors with gifts of food and fruit and speeches of welcome. The water color is framed with a letter from La Farge describing the ceremonies and dated: Samoa Nov. 22 '90. Lent by Mr. and Mrs. Bancel La Farge 52 SAMOAN GIRL STANDING IN A CANOE La Farge likened the Samoans to the ancient Greeks in their suppleness and beauty of body. Lent by Dr. William H. Smith 53 THREE GIRLS, SIVA DANCE, SAMOA Describing this dance, La Farge writes, "Everything, leaves, brown flesh, glistened with perfumed oil. From the small focus of the lamp, the light struck . . . upon the forms of the girls as if upon red bronze waxed." Lent by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston "- "" "*

54 BUTTRESSES OF THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH AND TOMB OF SIGA, IN THE REEF, SAPAPALI, SAMOA The tide washing over the tomb of Chief Seumanu's wife gave rise to these thoughts in the artist's journal: "There is some­ thing that made one dream, in this grave, now remembered, now forgotten, a reminder that all memory can be but tem­ porary. . . ." Lent anonymously 55 SPEARING FISH A Samoan stands in the quiet water on the lee side of a small island, with his long spear poised to strike a fish swimming past him. Lent by Miss Marian L. Bla\e 56 GREEN HILLS AND POOL A sketch of the lush growth of the South Sea Islands. Lent anonymously 57 SAMOAN DANCE An outdoor assembling of men and women for a dance, the favorite recreation of Samoa. Lent by the Century Association 58 SITTING SIVA DANCE By the light of a cocoanut fire, girls and men seated in a row are swaying to a chant. The figures in the background are beating out the time. Lent by the Carnegie Institute /

59 GIRLS SLIDING DOWN A WATERFALL, AT PA- PASEEA, SAMOA The Polynesians delight in the sport of sliding over the smooth, mossy rocks of a waterfall to land in the pool below. Lent by Mrs. Algernon Coolidge 60 YOUNG GIRLS PREPARING KAVA, SAMOA The preparation of this ceremonial drink from grated root fol­ lows a prescribed rhythm of motions and attitudes. Lent by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 61 STRANDED BOAT, SAMOA According to the inscription the three women handling the boat are Otaota, her mother, and a neighbor. Lent by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 62 COAST AT JATIVA Quick sketches made for an impression ol color, when there was no time to make a finished study. Lent anonymously 63 BAY OF UPONOHU, ISLAND OF MOOREA According to the artist's note this landscape, done in afternoon light, was left unfinished April 21, 1891. The height of the peak is 1,212 meters. Lent by Mrs. Richard L. Stores v 1*

64 BRIDLE PATH, TAHITI The grassy road along the shore opens vistas of sea, rocks, and sky. Lent by the Fogg Art Museum 3iffi8££^&&&§£^^

65 MOUNTAIN GORGE NEAR KANDY This landsacpe in Ceylon was painted on La Farge's return journey around the world after a year spent in the South Seas. Lent by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 66 A BACCHANTE Design, dated 1897, for a window in a private house at Saint Paul, Minnesota. Lent anonymously 67 THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE Study executed in 1900 for a window in the Frick Building, Pittsburgh. Lent anonymously 68 PROMISE OF IMMORTALITY A water-color design for the decoration of a church. It is not known whether the artist executed the sketch in more advanced medium. Lent by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 69 RUTH AND NAOMI A study for a stained-glass window at Vassar College, Pough- keepsie. Lent anonymously 70, 71 SKETCHES FOR MURALS AT SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA The Moral and Divine Law: Moses on Mount Sinai. The Recording of Precedents: Confucius and Three Disciples. These decorations were executed in 1905 for the Supreme Court Room of the Minnesota State Capitol. Lent anonymously 72, 73 SKETCHES FOR MURALS AT SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA The Relation of the Individual to the State: a Discussion be­ tween Socrates and His Friends. The Adjustment of Conflicting Interests: Count Raymond of Toulouse Taking the Oath to Defend Civil Liberty. Lent anonymously 74 DESIGN FOR THE FELTON WINDOW A window executed in 1904 for Memorial Hall, Harvard Uni­ versity. In ancient Greece fillets were tied on grave stelae as signs of mourning. Lent by the Brooklyn Museum OF THIS BOOK

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