American Masters of Painting / Being Brief Appreciations of Some American Painters

by Charles H. Caffin

John La Farge.

ALTAR PIECE—Church of the Ascension, New York.

By John La Farge.

the various phases of culture, of which art began by being one and grew to be the most absorbing.

It was significant that this dreamer should be attracted especially by the nature students among the living painters. That was indicative of the depth and sincerity of his contemplations. But it is still more significant that from the start he should have commenced a critical study of the problems of colour; this proved the independence of his sincerity. Another point of great significance, as affecting his subsequent career, is that, although he afterward made a close study of anatomy, in his apprentice days he seems to have drawn from drawings rather than from the living model, studying, in fact, the abstract made by others instead of the concrete directly studied by himself. Thus the habit of his mind was directed toward the generalization and significance of the figure rather than to its anatomical facts. This made him very early an enthusiastic admirer of Japanese art, and has proved at once the strength and weakness of his subsequent treatment of the figure.

It is frequently asserted that his drawing is not always correct, and from the point of view of the schools he would probably himself plead guilty to the charge. But those who insist upon the point do not perhaps quite comprehend his motive, which is less the actual structure of the form than the inherent significance of the figure. Let us grant at once that the two motives are not antagonistic, that Millet’s “Sower,” for example, is as structurally correct as it is full of significance. But that is to put La Farge to the test of one of the greatest masters of drawing, by comparison with whom very few can stand. By far the greatest number of draughtsmen, while approaching him in correctness, will be far behind him in expression. On the other hand, in the case of La Farge, the significance of a pose or gesture, the vital expression of a figure, is generally admirable. I have in mind, for example, his drawing of Bishop Hatto, pursued by rats. The distance from the thigh to the toes would appear to be exaggerated; but how wonderfully the long drawn out, tense arc of the figure stimulates the imagination to a realization of the agony of the crisis. There is another point. The figure, as it is, so exactly contributes to the decorative balance of the picture. It may be that the instinct of the decorator determined the length of limb, and perhaps also, not at all improbably, the influence of the Japanese. It would not be difficult, for instance, to find in Outamaro’s lovely prints of women just such an elongation to accentuate the svelte grace with which he wishes to invest them.

I make this suggestion with more confidence, because one can trace in the composition of this picture more than a little of the Japanese arrangement of full and empty spaces; that irregular form of composition which secures a balance by oppositions rather than by repetition of similarities. It is, indeed, the method of the nature student, as true of Velasquez and Rembrandt as of the Japanese. Not that La Farge with his choice appreciation of the old masters could be insensible to the influence of the Italians. His great altarpiece of the Ascension in the Church of the Ascension in New York is reminiscent in its structure of Raphael’s “Disputá.” The space is very similar in shape, and filled with a broad band of figures across the base, a central figure in the upper space, and flanking arcs of angels. Again the mural paintings of “Music” and the “Drama” in the music room of Mr. Whitelaw Reid’s New York house were evidently suggested by the pastoral scenes of the Venetian painters. The latter, however, were themselves, no doubt, suggested by the desire to emancipate painting from the rigidity of preconceived formulas of composition, and it is just this attempt to discover a compromise between the natural and the conventional which is so marked a characteristic of La Farge’s treatment of mural painting.

It may have been an early feeling after this that at least helped to draw him toward Rembrandt, especially toward his religious subjects. I find more than a little of the latter’s influence in the mural paintings in the churches of St. Thomas and of the Incarnation in New York, particularly in the solemn, serious naturalism of the grouping; in the humble devotion with which the spirit of the occasion has been comprehended, and in the significance of gesture and expression, but especially of gesture, through which this spirit has been embodied. A boy’s freshness of faith, dignified by a man’s realization of its import—a quality very rare at any period, and quite likely to be overlooked in this one. It is the outcome of a religious temperament—a thing very different from the religious habit—born of a capacity to feel deeply the significance of things, and by instinct and culture fitted to see the beauty inherent in the significance, whether it be the significance of the spiritual or of the material life or of the subtle analogy between the two. When the painter can comprehend this and set it down on the threshold of every-day experience, in such a way as to make it intimate without being commonplace, its human meaning neither lessening, nor lost in, the splendour of its expression, we may reasonably call him great.