In window-making he tried dozens of different experiments to get depth, variation, and complement of tone by repeated platings of pot-metal glass. As a result he produced brilliant jewel-like glass theretofore never dreamed of. With iridescent and opalescent sheets at hand in countless tones and shades he began the construction of his window, not in patches of color, but with a crayon cartoon, just as he had designed pictures. He made a pattern, filled the spaces rightly, and thought of the colors afterward. The lead lines helped out the design and did not break or block it by haphazard crossings at stated intervals. In other words, his radiant color schemes were every one of them based in design and had a foundation of drawing under them.
“This, then, is a study of line and is different from the notion of some intellectual friends that the line is to be put on afterward.”[9]
[9] La Farge in a letter to Mr. Cortissoz.
And yet there was no attempt to do in glass what could be better done on canvas. The brilliant transparent tones were peculiarly fitted for glass because they could not be squeezed out of a tube or laid down with a brush. I recall seeing in his shop years ago a tall narrow window, done, if I remember rightly, for the Whitney house, showing a robed female figure scattering autumn leaves upon a pool. The brilliant autumn tints, the light from the reflecting water, would have been impossible to render fully with pigments, and the blending of light and air seemed attainable only with La Farge’s delicate opaline glass. It seemed to me at the time a quite wonderful window, and yet he did many of them pitched in the same key of splendor.
In the midst of wall and window decorations La Farge found little time for easel-painting—something he regretted but could not help. Twice, however, he broke away from the shop and went upon long trips. The first was to Japan with Henry Adams in 1886. Out of that came many water-color sketches and drawings, besides a charming book, An Artist’s Letters from Japan. To some the book is of more interest than the drawings. The temple-doors and interiors and Buddhas of his sketches are, no doubt, truthfully illustrative, and that is perhaps their failing as pictures. The model was too apparent and the artist not so much in evidence as could be wished for. His own negative definition of art applies just here: “It is never the mere representation of what we see.” Some of the mountain landscapes, however, are very fine, and his garden bits recall the early La Farge of the pond-lilies and the “Paradise Valley.”
“The Three Kings,” by John La Farge.
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
(click image to enlarge)
His second long trip was again with Henry Adams and this time to the South Seas. He was gone for a year or more, from 1890 and on, and out of this trip came another engaging book, Reminiscences of the South Seas, besides many water-color drawings. The water-colors were again illustrative, but perhaps they were more animated than the Japanese series, had to do more intimately with the island life, and were often strikingly picturesque in theme and movement. With them came also a number of small sea-pieces showing bays, harbors, and islands done with the greatest simplicity and yet having a satin-and-silk quality about them quite indescribable in its beauty. These silvery sea-pieces are in the same class with La Farge’s early violets and roses—things that are exquisite in their surface texture and their color beauty. His mountain landscapes of the South Seas are again superb in their greens and blues. A love and a gift for landscape always remained with him, and one often wonders, had he devoted himself to this alone, what new revelations of the world about us he might have handed down in art.
The groups of natives in dances or games or ceremonies naturally attract the most attention in the South Seas water-colors. Technically they are interesting because of their hark back to Delacroix. Not only the reds, blues, greens, and flesh notes are like Delacroix, but the drawing of the hands and feet, the movement of arms and legs are much like that master. All his life La Farge had carried that impress about with him. A few years before he died one of his pictures, at an exhibition or sale, was so like a Delacroix that at first, from across the room, I thought it by the great romanticist. Some time later in mentioning the fact to La Farge he nodded his head and said that he had been very much influenced by Delacroix and no doubt unconsciously did things in his style or manner.