American painting and its tradition

by John C. Van Dyke

With a select public, however, La Farge had already won recognition. His landscapes and flower pictures—especially the latter with their lovely color, texture, and surface, and that indefinable feeling that is La Farge—met with appreciation from artists and amateurs. The Academy of Design elected him to its membership, and, a little later, a firm of Boston publishers began publishing some of his illustrations made for Browning’s poems. He had planned some three hundred drawings for Browning, and for an edition of the Gospels many more. These were La Farge’s romantic days, and the influences of French romanticism intellectually and his Japanese prints technically were rather strong with him. In fancy he was harking back to Greek and mediæval myths, Bible legends, and Arabian Nights tales. But only a few drawings from each field finally found their way into print. They appeared in the old Riverside Magazine and were accounted very effective, even after the engraver had translated them. Every one who has written about La Farge has devoted a page or so to an analysis of his “Wolf Charmer” and “Piper of Hamelin.” Criticised they were for what has been declared faulty construction and drawing but never for their lack of life. They were excellent examples of naturalistic drawing wherein accuracy is often sacrificed to vitality. But the telling quality of the illustrations was not so much their technique as their imagination. La Farge had inner as well as outer vision, and the conception of the wolf charmer, for example, as half-wolf himself, gnawing rather than playing his pipe, was perhaps the better part of its excellence.

But illustration was to engage his attention for only a short period. He was interested in things of larger decorative significance. Describing one day some work of art that I cannot now recall he used the word “decorative” and I remember his pausing and saying rather emphatically in parenthesis: “And when I say decorative, I am saying about the best thing I can about a picture.” Imagination he had in abundance, but perhaps it was manifested stronger in the light and color of his decorations than in such literary readings as the “Wolf Charmer.” His glass was the finest flight in color of modern times. It remains so to this day. The same creative sense of hue on a large scale was shown in his mural work. His panels and lunettes have their individual meaning and their imaginative presentation of the type, but these are only parts of a whole which carries again by its decorative color sweep.

His first wall decorations were those for Trinity Church, Boston, in 1876. They were done under time pressure in less than six months—done in winter with open windows and everybody clad in overcoats and gloves. Ten or a dozen painters worked under him and with him, among them Frank Millet, Francis Lothrop, and George Maynard. It was the first attempt in America to do church decoration on a large scale with a group of painters directed by one head. The unusual conditions and requirements limited its success, and yet it was quickly recognized as being an initial step of much importance and La Farge was acclaimed as the leader of the new order. Thereafter commissions for churches, public buildings, and private houses came to him and did not cease to come up to his death. He at first did panels for the Church of the Incarnation, decorations for St. Thomas’s Church, afterward destroyed by fire, and for the Reid house in New York; in his late years he painted great lunettes for the capitol at St. Paul. Perhaps the climax of these wall-paintings is the picture of the “Ascension” set up on the chancel wall of the Church of the Ascension, in New York. It is his chief work, and is picture-making, wall-painting, and church decoration all in one.

The “Ascension” had its origin in one of La Farge’s drawings for a western chapel. It was enlarged to meet the new need by putting in at the back a high and wide mountain landscape. The architectural place for it was simplified by placing on the chancel wall of the church a heavily gilded moulding, deep-niched, and with an arched top which acted at once both as a frame and a limit to the picture. The space was practically that of a huge window with a square base and a half-circle top requiring for its filling two groups of figures one above the other. La Farge placed his standing figures of the apostles and the holy women in the lower space and their perpendicular lines paralleled the uprights of the frame; at the top he placed an oval of angels hovering about the risen Christ, and, again, the rounded lines of the angel group repeated the curves of the gilded arch.

“The Muse,” by John La Farge.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There was no great novelty in this arrangement. It was frankly adopted from Italian Renaissance painting and had been used for high altar-pieces by all the later painters—Andrea del Sarto, Raphael, Titian, Palma. They had worked out the best way of filling that upright-and-arched space, and La Farge followed the tradition because he recognized its sufficiency. But when all that is said it should be added that his “Ascension” is no close following of Italian example. The grouping is different and the setting is quite the opposite of the Italian. This is an open-air Ascension, not a studio-lighted gathering of academic figures posed merely to repeat each other’s linear contours. The apostles stand in a great valley plain with mountains at the sides and back. They stand in, not out, of the landscape. The angels are in a huge floating oval about the risen Christ. What beautiful moving circling figures they are! With what superb recognition of light, air, and space they are given! And how they hold their exact place in relation to the background and to the figures below them! All of La Farge’s knowledge and skill came into play in painting these two groups that contrast with and yet complete each other. They are his highest achievement in figure-painting. It may be merely provincial pride that makes one think they do not suffer by comparison with the groups of the great Italians, yet there are intelligent people who believe that.

But after one has studied and wondered over these figures, he begins to look further, and finally comes to question if the enveloping landscape is not the more beautiful part of the picture. No such landscape was ever painted by any old master, not even by Titian in his “Presentation” picture in the Venice Academy. And thereby hangs a tale. La Farge could not at first get the right landscape for it, and in the middle of the work, that is in 1886, he and his friend Henry Adams went on a long trip to Japan. It was in the mountains of Japan (or was it, perhaps, later in the South Sea islands?) that he saw and sketched the superb landscape that now does service in the background of the “Ascension.” It fitted the figures exactly and is their natural and proper environment. Figures and groups from Italy that are not Italian and landscapes from Japan that are not Japanese blend together perfectly because translated, transmuted, by the genius of La Farge into something that is peculiarly his own type of the Ascension. In such fashion, and of such materials, is great art brought into being.

La Farge’s glass-work carried over the greater part of his artistic life. Mr. Cortissoz tells us that he did several thousand windows of various patterns and designs. For many years, and up to his death, he had a shop in South Washington Square where, with assistants and workmen, the more mechanical part of window construction was carried on. But he looked after every part of it from start to finish. He never let go of his workman, never allowed himself as a designer to be eliminated by turning his design over wholly to the shop. He followed up everything and exacted results while inspiring enthusiasm and intelligence in his men. The result was that the work, in spite of the touch of others, remained peculiarly that of La Farge and bore his individual stamp.