“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 writers in 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 for Le Pays, La Presse, and La Liberté, and publishing books such as Hommes et Dieux, Barbares et Bandits, Les Dieux et les Demi-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 of La France and the Journal 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 controversy between 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