Then, still of his early days, are to be considered the faithful little studies and close-to-nature drawings which served as a foundation for a structure of knowledge which was to pile itself high enough. Sic itur ad astra; and with a different result from the tower-building recorded in Genesis. The reproduction given [[on page 9]] is from a sketch-book of 1860; and the work has been a careful drawing in black on white, done in the flat country about Bayou Têche. These are drawings in values, or made for values; that is to say, the relative force of darkness or of light is carefully preserved. A certain green of the trees may be lighter than the blue, still water below, but is very much darker than the same water where it reflects the pale evening sky; the reflection in the water of those same trees is a shade or two darker than the mass of trees themselves; and so on, forever. Of the same epoch is this drawing of a beacon [[page 10]], a flaming cresset, a signal light seen against a night sky. These are warnings to steamboats on the Mississippi to avoid a shoal or to make a landing. Other studies, those of pure line and those of masses, those of his youth and those of his maturity, are scattered over these pages.
He has produced also a very great number of water-color drawings, generally small, and very commonly having for their subjects pieces of foreground detail, such as one or several blossoms in a pool of water, or a water-lily or two afloat on the surface of a still pond. It might almost be said that his water-colors were generally of such detail as this, except that the work done during his journeys into tropical and oriental lands has resulted differently.
Again he has produced, during those years of work, a few large pictures painted in oil-color or by a process which he learned in his youth and in which melted wax has a part; though this is not the encaustic process of antiquity or of modern revival. One or two of these are portraits, several are landscapes, several are studies of interesting details which he wished to preserve and which for some reason or other had struck him as more easily rendered on a large scale and in the more solid material; and some are, to all appearance, concepts for mural decoration—advance studies for that which was to be painted on a still larger scale, or in combination with other parts of a large composition, and finally to be fixed upon the wall where it was to remain permanently. Some, also, of the water-colors produced in recent years are, though not large in superficies, very large in treatment. A glowing color composition suggested by the mountain country of Fiji, a monochrome study of a river landscape in Japan, may be as grandiose in character and may contain as much matter, both in represented detail and in artistic purpose, as an oil-painting of four times the surface-measurement. Some illustrations given on another page of this treatise may partly show the qualities here suggested.
Panel, from One of the Ceilings in Cornelius Vanderbilt's House. Inlaid glass, ivory, bronze, marble and silver, and mother-of-pearl.
Figure from the Vanderbilt Ceiling.
He has produced, also, a few such mural paintings as those whose intention is assumed in the last paragraph. Of these, much the largest is that which covers the end wall of the Church of the Ascension in New York. There are others in St. Thomas's Church and in the Church of the Incarnation, both in New York City; the interior of Trinity Church in Boston was painted by him with a series of figure subjects, though the chromatic treatment of this interior does not include any large single painting of great importance; and of late years, two lunettes in the Villard-Reid house in New York and one in the Walker Art Gallery at Bowdoin College have been added to this summary list. There is reproduced here the last-named picture [[page 17]; a picture of fantastic subject in the "literary" or narrative sense. Athens is its given name; but it represents Pallas making a drawing of the lovely and unadorned genius of the open country or wood, while the robed and crowned impersonated City looks affectionately at both the subject and the recording goddess. To be classed under the head of mural paintings also is the remarkable composition of small pictures involved in a large design with panels and arabesques, which decorates the wooden vaults of that gallery in Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt's house, which used to be called the Water-Color Room, and which now, since the alteration of the house and the removal of this painted vault into the new building, may be considered the gallery of entrance for stately entertainments. To a limited extent, the work of other painters is associated with his own in the last-named achievement, as also in Trinity Church. In this, the work of the artist comes very near to decoration pure and simple. The reader is not to understand that any sharp distinction is made here between decoration and that painting which is not so designated. It is to be hoped that he, the reader, will see as he reads that to deny this distinction is part of the life-purpose of John La Farge; a purpose which his critic is glad to recognize and to second. It is merely with reference to its placing—to its apparent intended service—to its fixed location and its consequent exclusion from the category of "gallery pictures" or "easel pictures" that the words decoration and decorative are here applied to certain paintings. For throughout his career this artist has leaned strongly toward the treatment of his expressional and significant painting in a decorative way.