Monument in Newport Cemetery
Erected Under the Direction
of John La Farge
and Augustus St. Gaudens.
That this power over color is the life and soul of the decorator need hardly be urged. Decoration which is applied to a flat surface and which is not in relief, except, perhaps, to a slight extent and occasionally, has for its main object, its main desideratum, richness or refinement of coloring, or both. If one has a wall to decorate, the first idea of the true decorator is to invest it with splendor or with delicate strength of color. He seeks for fresco, or the encaustic process, or mosaic, or, as in modern times, oil-painting upon a strained canvas, indifferently and according to the spirit of his time and the practice of his contemporaries; but his object is one and the same—to invest his wall or ceiling with noble color. Little may he care what the subject of the painting or mosaic may be. According to the requirements of the epoch or community in which he lives, it may be a procession of saints or a dance of bacchanals; the primary object which he has in view is to procure a most enjoyable and delightful piece of color—and other things are of secondary importance. Glass, then, would seem to be especially prepared for La Farge's work, and La Farge especially prepared for glass. Consider the memorial window which fills a window-opening in a church at North Easton, Mass., a town which owes much to the lady whose memory is thus honored. Upon a background of broken and changing blue are relieved the three figures larger than life-size which nearly fill the opening. Two of these figures are clothed, one in drapery of the most vivid green, the other in drapery of orange-brown; that is to say, these are the general colors offered to the eye of the spectator by the infinite number of minor tints, all passing into one another in subtle gradation, which make up the general mass of drapery. It is to be observed, then, that these figures are also seen to be clothed in rags, and that the idea, the notion of wretchedness and tatters is maintained in spite of the sumptuous clothing of glowing color which invests it all. That is an instance as good as can be found of what the colorist has to do in this world. He does not ask whether beggars have ever been dressed in such garments as have been described, but he has to express the two-fold image, Beggary and splendid color, and out of these he makes up his work of art, as unlike as may be to anything in nature, but none the worse for that. To return to mural painting; there is one merit which all La Farge's brother-painters agree in awarding to him, and that is the power of putting a painting upon the wall so that it does not change the character of the wall as a part of the building. His painting takes nothing away from the solidity of the wall which it invests. The upright mass retains its rigidity and weight, it still carries the roof, it still holds firmly to the adjoining walls, it is a massive and trustworthy part of the construction, and the painted picture has added to rather than taken from its permanent and resting quality. How this is done is fully as inexplicable as is the glow and splendor of color itself. No one can say abstractly and without having the picture immediately before him how any such result is attained, nor is it easy to explain the picture, even to the looker-on, in any such terms as will fully express this quality. It is one of the most valuable qualities which mural painting can possess—mural painting which fluctuates between the flatness which is also feebleness and a kind of realism which carries with it the effect of out-of-doors—of a hole in the wall. The same thing obtains in his minor work, and here the background, the temple, or rock, forty feet away, is as perfectly detached from the foreground figures as would be a distant and airy mountain miles away, while still the picture remains flat cardboard or flat canvass invested with light and shade and color.
"Athens." Mural Painting in the Walker Art Gallery at Bowdoin College.
We are brought naturally to the consideration of Mr. La Farge's landscape. He is not generally considered as a landscape painter; and yet he has produced a great deal of landscape in the secondary or accessory part of his work. He has also painted landscape of first intention, so to speak, landscape which is nothing but landscape, and that, at different times in his life; always succeeding, and yet always turning away from landscape to what seems to be his chosen work of figure subject used decoratively. Landscape-painting is unquestionably the art of our epoch, the one branch of the art of painting which this century has excelled in; and, therefore, La Farge was inevitably drawn toward landscape painting, he being a man of his time, if also a man of strong individual peculiarities. It would be hard for a student of art in the abstract, a theorizer, a critic and a lover of the arts of the past, to avoid painting landscape when everybody around him is painting landscape; and accordingly La Farge has turned his attention to that, but the odd thing is that he has not stayed there, that he has not continued to be a landscape painter primarily. It would seem to the hasty observer of landscape painting that this department of art alone would have afforded material for all of his artistic dreams and for all his artistic purposes, for what is more truly decorative than landscape such as is shown in the wonderful Paradise Valley? That picture is made up of light and color. The surface of thick, lush, summer grass, the surface of rock dimly seen, the surface of ocean, the hazy sky, all together go to form a mass of glowing and yet delicate color the like of which it is very hard to find in simple landscape anywhere in ancient or modern art. Until recent years there were only half a dozen such pictures of wide landscape, numerous as were his studies in that style; for otherwise his finished landscapes were chiefly those composed of foreground rock, of iris seen against a wild-rose covered bank, of three or four water-lily blossoms and a dozen little buds floating on still water; or else they were landscape backgrounds to figure subjects in which the landscape was evidently made, of deliberate purpose, a thing of less intention and of inferior interest. During the last ten years, however, La Farge has produced an immense number of singularly effective drawings in monochrome and in color, made either on the spot in Samoa, in Fiji, in Japan, or elsewhere in the far East, or made after his return home, from studies carefully noted during his stay abroad. Of these landscape drawings, some are of extended and really vast stretches of country. Mountains are introduced which are several miles away, and show in relief against a pale sky, every detail of the mountain being rendered as the eye could have seen it from the point of view occupied by the painter, and the whole wrought into a wonderfully glowing panorama of green passing into blue against the green mystery of the firmament. There are also among these drawings pictures which are Turnerian in their love of and sympathy with mist and vapor and their enjoyment of pure and delightful color produced by sunlight upon such vapor. Among these are four drawings of the Valley of Tokio seen from a hill above the city, the vision of the artist reaching across the valley and including its whole extent and the mountains which form the boundary. In other words, each of these landscapes includes a range of one hundred square miles of country at least, and its investing and overflowing drapery of cloud and of low-lying vapor; and yet these were four small drawings, mere studies on leaves of a sketch-book. It is the greatest misfortune to Americans that they have been scattered among four different owners. If it were possible for the Boston Museum, under its wise direction, to gather these four drawings into its ownership and to exhibit them side by side well lighted and isolated from other conflicting art, a real service would be done to the whole community of art students; for there is in them an abundance of the true landscape feeling, of the true landscape sympathy, of that love of the magnificence, and the refinement of nature which no transcript can give, but which the thought of the artist when stimulated powerfully by the contemplation of the glory of nature will transfer to his material medium.
Much of this character exists in the sepia drawing of the "Dry Bed of the Dayagawa River," [[page 7]] which hardly needs analysis in words, since it is capable of fairly complete reproduction.