That other is John LaFarge, admittedly the greatest mural painter the world has seen in recent years. His life was a fortunate one. His father, an officer of the French marine, came to this country in 1806, married, and purchased a great plantation in Louisiana, from which he derived a large revenue. His son, born in 1835, grew up in an artistic atmosphere of books and pictures, and was early taught to draw. When, after some study of law, he visited Paris, his father advised him to take up the study of art as an accomplishment, and he entered one of the studios, merely as an amateur, at the same time gaining admittance, through his family connections, to the inner artistic circles of the capital. For some years he studied art, not to become a painter, but because he wished to understand and appreciate great work, and at the end of that time, he returned to New York and entered a lawyer's office.
But he was ill at ease there, and finally definitely decided upon an artistic career, went to Newport and worked under the guidance of William Morris Hunt, painting everything, but turning in the end to decorative work, and afterwards to stained glass. In these he has had no equal, and his high achievement, as well as the wide appreciation his work has won, is peculiarly grateful to Americans, since LaFarge's career has been characteristically American. He had little actual study in Europe, and yet possesses certain great traditions of the masters to a degree unequalled by any compatriot.
Of his work as a whole, it is difficult to speak adequately. Perhaps its most striking characteristic is the thought that is lavished upon it, so that the artist gives us the very spirit of his subjects. In inspiration, in handling, in drawing, and in color, LaFarge stands alone. No man of his generation has equalled him in the power to lift the spectator out of himself and into an enchanted world by the consummate harmony of strong, pure color. This feeling for color culminated in his stained-glass work—probably the richest color creations that have ever been fashioned on this earth. In all his varied mass of production there is nothing that lacks interest and charm.
We have referred to LaFarge's study under William Morris Hunt, and we must pause for a moment to speak of the older artist. His artistic career was in some respects an accident, for, developing a tendency to consumption in his late boyhood, his mother took him to Rome and remained there long enough to enable him to imbibe some of the artistic traditions of the Eternal City and to begin work with H. K. Brown, the sculptor. He found the work so congenial that he persuaded his mother to omit the course at Harvard which had been expected of him, and to permit him to devote his life to art.
For five or six years thereafter, he studied at Rome and Paris, then for three years he was with Millet at Barbizon. Finally, in 1855, he returned to America, settling first at Newport and afterwards at Boston. He painted many portraits and figure pieces, and was an active social and artistic influence to the day of his death. As an artist, he lacked training, and remained to the end an amateur of great promise, which was never quite fulfilled.
And this brings us to the most eccentric, the most striking, and in some respects the greatest artist of his time—James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Whistler was born at Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834. His grandfather, of an English family long settled in Ireland, had been a member of Burgoyne's invading army, but afterwards joined the American service, and, after the close of the Revolution, settled at Lowell. His father was a distinguished engineer, and major in the army, and after his death in 1849, it was natural that young Whistler should turn to the army as a career. He entered West Point in 1851, remained there three years, and was finally dropped for deficiency in chemistry.
There was one study, however, in which he had distinguished himself, and that was drawing; and after his dismissal he went to Paris, where he studied for two or three years. Then he removed to London, where most of the remainder of his life was spent. His work, striking and original, was at first utterly misunderstood by the public. The most famous piece of hostile criticism to which he was subjected was Ruskin's remark, after looking at "The Falling Rocket" in 1877, that here was a fellow with the effrontery to charge a hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face. Some further years of abuse followed, and then the pendulum swung the other way, and the eccentric artist became a sort of cult. In the end, he won a wide reputation, and before his death was recognized as one of the leading painters of his time.
And this reputation was deserved, for his work possesses a rare and delicate beauty, individual to it. His portraits of his mother and of Thomas Carlyle are admirable in their simplicity and quiet dignity; and many of his "harmonies," as he liked to call them, are so complete and flawless that they are works of pure delight. Whistler always declared that he had no desire to reproduce external nature, but only beautiful combinations of pattern, and tone; what he meant, probably, was that he sought, not external realities, but the spirit which underlies them. That, of course, has been the quest of every great painter.
If Whistler was a law unto himself, so, in another sense, is Winslow Homer, who has worked out for himself an individual point of view and method of expression. Born in Boston in 1836, and early developing a taste for drawing, he entered a lithographer's shop at the age of nineteen and two years later set up for himself. During the Civil War he acted as correspondent and artist for Harper's Weekly, and, when peace came, began his paintings with a series of army scenes. After that he tried his hand at landscape, and finally found his real vocation as a painter of the sea. From the first, his pictures possessed obvious sincerity. More than that, they convince by their absolute veracity, as a reproduction of the thing seen—seen, be it understood, by the eyes of the artist—and so they have lived and been remembered where more ambitious work would have been forgotten. Again, he chooses his subjects with a fine disregard of what other men have done or decided that it was impossible to do, and painted them in a manner wholly independent and original. No other artist has so conveyed on canvas the weight and buoyancy and enormous force of water; no one else approaches his as an interpreter of the power of the sea.
Lineal successor of Inness is Dwight William Tryon, not that his work resembles the older man's, but because both paint the American landscape with a deep personal feeling and with a superb technique. Tryon has not yet developed into so commanding a figure as Inness, but there is no telling what the future holds for him, for his work seems as full of poetry and emotion as the older man's, with a spirit more delicate and a foundation more firm.