American painting and its tradition

by John C. Van Dyke

“I kept in touch with that greatest of all characters of art, style—not the style of the academy or any one man, but the style of all the schools, the manner of looking at art which is common to all important personalities, however fluctuating its form may be.”

In Copenhagen he made a copy of a Rembrandt.

“I was enabled to learn a great deal of the methods of Rembrandt and to connect them with my studies.... Rubens I followed in Belgium, trying to see every painting of his throughout the whole kingdom and as many of his pupils’ as I could gather in.”

He had an admiration for the severe training of Rubens and for his later prodigal expenditure of energy and paint on canvas. In the autumn of 1857-1858 he was studying Titian, Velasquez, and many others of the famous masters at the Manchester Exhibition in England. There also he saw and studied the Preraphaelite painters and became acquainted with several of them.

“They made a very great and important impression upon me, which later influenced me in my first work when I began to paint.”

When La Farge returned to New York (his father’s illness had hastened his return) nothing as to art had been decided upon and no method of painting had been definitely learned. He had had a unique and very wonderful experience for a young man, had gathered up much information, and perhaps unconsciously had developed an inquiring attitude of mind. This latter became his habitual attitude; he was always contemplative, meditative, disposed to question. Perhaps that is the reason why he still hesitated about embracing art as a profession. At any rate, he went back to the study of law, though not forsaking his interest in painting and architecture. The following year he took a room in the Tenth Street Studio Building, where he was accustomed to go to make little drawings and paint “in an amateurish way.” He recognized that he needed technical training and once more thought of returning to Europe to get it.

In 1859 he went to Newport to study painting under William M. Hunt, whose methods he did not altogether like, though he was fond of the man. Hunt was then devoted to Jean François Millet, and, through Hunt, La Farge came to know that painter’s work. He copied two or three of Millet’s pictures but could not accept him wholly any more than he could Hunt. The truth was that even then La Farge was an original and would follow no one. He could not abide recipes for doing or making things, though eventually he invented a recipe of his own and followed that.

At Newport he did some landscapes looking through a window to show the difference in light between the inside and the outside. It was for educative purposes, not for picture-making. In the same way he painted flowers in a vase at haphazard, or did the corner of a table, with no idea of composition but merely to get acquainted with all phases of light, texture, and surface. The next year he was back in New York, painting was temporarily abandoned, and presently he departed for Louisiana. He could not, however, keep away from painting wherever he went, and he soon returned to New York to start a picture of St. Paul Preaching for the Church of the Paulists. With John Bancroft he next took up the question of light and color, then being investigated by scientific men. That, he declares, had an important influence on his later work. But probably the event that definitely decided him for an art career was his marriage in 1860 to Miss Margaret Brown Perry, a great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin.

I have helped myself largely to Mr. Cortissoz’s book (for which I am sure he will not quarrel with me) regarding these educational happenings of La Farge’s early days, because they point to an unusual acquaintance with philosophic, literary, and artistic traditions. La Farge was saturated with them at twenty-two. His education was extraordinary when compared with his American contemporaries—Inness, Wyant, Martin, Homer. He had found himself before he was thirty and knew what he wanted to say and do, whereas Homer at sixty was still uncertain and groping. Art had come to La Farge almost as a child learns to talk, that is, unconsciously, without great effort. The formulas had been largely thought out for him and he had merely to accept them. With Inness, Wyant, and Martin it was necessary to make their own formulas, work out their own philosophy, establish their own premises. And that, too, after they had come to man’s estate. La Farge had a great advantage over them. He was not only born to art but had it thrust upon him. With his fine natural endowments of mind and eye it is not, perhaps, remarkable that he afterward was able to achieve art in a large way and in more than one department.

But he did not rest content with his early experiences. He took up new problems and remained a student to his latest day. His mental curiosity was remarkable. He was always trying to get at the cause or sequence of things. I remember very well arguing at him one day, with undue vehemence perhaps, about some question of the hour, and hearing his quiet answer that it made no difference which of us was right, but that we should go along together and try to get at the truth. That was his Gallic cast of mind. He had no wish or care to put the other fellow in the wrong, and as for disputatious argument, it was not intellectually good form. In this respect Ruskin had amused and vexed him during his early years. The great critic was not only wrong in matter but in the method of presenting it. Fromentin, on the contrary, pleased him much. The French critic’s mind was of the same order as his own.