came too early for perfect expression, but, like many of the rude
forefathers, he had the fine virtue of sincerity. You cannot help
but admire his frankness, his honesty, even his brutality. There is
no pretense about him; he makes no apology, offers no preface or
explanation. He presents a point of view, and in the very brusqueness
of his presentation seems to say: “Take it or let it alone.” He must
have known his expression was incomplete. Did he realize that art was
too long and life too short to round the whole circle? The majority
of painters move over only a small segment of the span. At sixty,
Homer had no more than found his theme. It would have taken another
lifetime to have given him style and method. And even then, grace of
accomplishment might have weakened force of conception. He had his
errors, but perhaps they emphasized his fundamental truths. So perhaps
we should be thankful that he was just what he was--a great American
painter who was sufficient unto himself in both thought and expression.
VI
JOHN LA FARGE
La Farge is an exceptional man in American painting--the exception
that will perhaps prove the value of tradition and education in the
craft. More than any other in our history he was born to art. He did
not live through a barefoot stage on a farm and then by chance come
to a speaking acquaintance with painting at twenty or thereabouts;
he could not boast of a struggle against adverse circumstances in an
uncongenial environment. On the contrary, he was rather luxuriously
raised in a city, and as a child found art in the family circle and a
part of the family life. He had begun to see, hear, and think about
it at six years of age. At thirty, when he definitely decided to
accept painting as a vocation, he knew the tale quite well, was highly
endowed intellectually, and had the insight and the imagination to see
things in significant aspects. What wonder that he made an impression
and left a body of work that voiced authority! He himself became a
master, caught up the torch and carried on the light, spreading it and
diffusing it in this new world. He was an inheritor and transmitter of
art as well as a creator of it.
By that I do not mean that La Farge was raised in a studio and trained
in hand and eye like a Florentine apprentice, but rather that his
family, with its collateral branches, was made up of highly educated
dilettanti, and art as a theme was ever up with them for discussion
and appreciation. He grasped it historically and æsthetically long
before he took it up professionally. The practical processes were
taught him, to some extent, even as a child; but the philosophy came
first and remained with him to the last. It was the French philosophy
of taste--the best of the time--and La Farge himself was French save
for the accident of his birth here in New York. It was the tradition
of Delacroix that he finally accepted and transplanted here in
American soil, adding to it, of course, his own profound thought and
fine feeling. “He prided himself on faithfulness to tradition and
convention,” according to his long-time friend Henry Adams.
The story of his birth and education reads somewhat romantically
to-day, though it was only yesterday that he was here. His father
as a young man was an officer in the French navy and had been sent
to Santo Domingo, during an uprising there, to seize Toussaint the
revolutionist. The enterprise went against him, but he escaped the
general massacre that followed and eventually found himself a refugee
in the United States. He did not return to France, but instead went
into sugar-growing in Louisiana, acquired property in New York, and
married there a daughter of M. Binsse de St. Victor, a Santo Domingo
sugar-planter, who, like himself, had been driven from the island by
the uprising under Toussaint. These French refugees were La Farge’s
parents and he, himself, was born in Beach Street, near St. John’s
Church, in 1835. The house was in what has latterly been called old New
York and La Farge never entirely got out of that quarter. During his
life he did not live above Tenth Street.
His parents were very cultivated people and as a boy La Farge’s
education was precisely guided. His father was a rather severe type and
instilled rugged principles. He was a good teacher, and the pupil was
brought up to do exact thinking. In his reading he was not permitted
to roam at large. He tells us in his letters and communications to Mr.
Cortissoz, whose admirable account I am paraphrasing,[8] that as a
child he read French and English, read St. Pierre, Rousseau, Bossuet,
Homer, De Foe, Voltaire--certainly an odd lot of authors for childish
consumption. The house was full of books--Molière, Racine, Corneille,
Cervantes, Byron--some of them illustrated with handsome Turneresque
engravings, which no doubt had quite as much influence on the boy as
the printed texts. The outlook of his parents was large and La Farge
grew up in an atmosphere of liberal ideas.
[8] _John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study_, by Royal Cortissoz, Boston,
1911.
As for the house, he speaks of it as being “really very elegant” and
regarding the pictures on the walls, he says:
“The influences which I felt as a little boy were those of the
paintings and the works of art that surrounded me at home.” There were
examples in the house of Vernet, Le Moyne, Salvator Rosa, Sebastiano
del Piombo, many Dutch pictures, particularly “a beautiful Salomon
Rysdael.” “It so happened that my very first teachings were those of
the eighteenth century and my training has covered almost a century and
a half.”
At six he had wished to draw and paint, and was handed over to his
maternal grandfather to be taught. The grandfather had been ruined by
his Santo Domingo losses, and in his age had no other resource than
to fall back upon the polite learning he had acquired in his youth.
He took up miniature painting and gave drawing lessons because, as La
Farge explained it, “it was in the family.”
“On a small scale he was an exquisite painter. He was also a good
teacher and started me at six years old in the traditions of the
eighteenth century.... The teaching was as mechanical as it could be
and was rightly based upon the notion that a boy ought to be taught so
as to know his trade. There was not the slightest alleviation and no
suggestion of this being ‘art.’”
He was taught to sharpen crayons, to fasten paper, to draw parallel
lines, and produce a tint. Gradually he came to copy such things as
engravings. The work became more interesting, and at eight he could
do something that had resemblance to an original. Later he copied
everything that came to hand and was free to do as he pleased.
In the meantime his general education was not neglected. His
grandmother Binsse de St. Victor had opened a school for young ladies
which was very successful. La Farge as a boy took lessons under her,
and in his reminiscences recalls the severity of his drilling in
eighteenth-century French. He got English from an English governess,
and some German from an Alsatian nurse. Then came books and school
and the dreariness of lessons on dry themes. He was sent to Columbia
Grammar School, passed into Columbia College, changed over to Fordham,
and finally, in 1853, graduated at Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland.
He recalls that during his school-days there was much reading of
history, literature, and archæology. In English his professor led him
to read Newman and Ruskin--the two great masters of style, though
the one was classic and the other romantic. In French there was De
Musset, Balzac, Heine. He was familiar with Greek and Latin--he could
not have graduated from a Catholic college without knowing Latin--and
had early gone over the classical writers in the original languages.
As for art, he studied engravings of Dürer and lithographs of the old
masters. “An English water-color painter had been found who gave me
thoroughly English lessons.” After college days he got lessons from a
French artist. In later life, looking at his drawings made in the early
fifties, he thought them “respectable.” “They were largely based on
line and construction, which of course gives a basis of seriousness.”
After graduation he entered a lawyer’s office and began studying law,
though he still held his interest in art. Some pictures of the men of
1830 were beginning to come into the country and he recalls buying for
a few dollars a Diaz, a Troyon, and a Bargue, and his delight in them.
He met artists like Inness, talked art and thought much about it, but
he was not yet prepared to embrace it for better or worse. In 1856,
when he was twenty-one, he went to Europe, not minded even then to
study art professionally, but merely wishing travel for travel’s sake
and to be for a time a looker-on.
He went directly to Paris and joined his cousin, Paul Binsse (or Bins),
Comte de St. Victor, who was just then holding prominent place in
literary and journalistic Paris. The cousin was writing in a brilliant
style dramatic, literary, and art criticism for _Le Pays_, _La Presse_,
and _La Liberté_, and publishing books such as _Hommes et Dieux_,
_Barbares et Bandits_, _Les Dieux et les_ _Demi-Dieux de la peinture_.
He was in association with the Goncourts, Sainte-Beuve, Théophile
Gautier, Victor Hugo, Flaubert--all the great gods of little Paris.
The father, Jacques Benjamin Maximilien Binsse, Comte de St. Victor,
had had a literary and artistic vogue before the son. He had been
the editor of _La France_ and the _Journal des Débats_, had written
for the stage and the opera, and was the author of numerous books of
poetry, archæology, and history. He was still alive and flourishing
when La Farge reached Paris, and his house was open to the young man
from America. It was the house of a collector of paintings; the most
famous artists and literary men met there; there was much comment and
criticism in the air--much roaring of the lions. La Farge was in the
midst of it. As he expressed it: “Art and literature were there at my
hand, in rather an ancient form, but with the charm of the past, the
eighteenth century, and the wonderful beginning of the nineteenth.”
The great uncle was in sympathy with the classic and the academic,
stood up for David and Guérin, and looked askance at everything new;
but the cousin, Paul de St. Victor, was the champion of the younger
men. La Farge was between two fires in the home and listened to both
sides when he went abroad. He met Gérôme, then a young man, frequented
the house of Chasseriau, heard much of the controversy between Ingres
and Delacroix. He never met Delacroix, but was profoundly impressed
by his works. He was also much impressed at this early time by the
glass in the Paris churches, and during a trip to Brussels met Henry
Le Strange, who had decorated Ely Cathedral, and through him became
interested in methods of mural painting.
The father in America thought that his son was wasting his time and
wrote him urging that he take up art seriously. The result was that La
Farge went to Couture’s studio and had a talk with the master. He did
not even then think of art as a profession, and wanted from Couture not
so much technical education as general education in art. He spent only
two weeks in the studio and then set about copying the drawings of the
old masters in the Louvre. Presently he went to Munich and afterward to
Dresden, copying in each place more of the drawings of the old masters.
He thought this a logical and very serious way of learning art. And so
it was. In copying the drawings he got at the understructure whereas
in the paintings he got only the surface. La Farge from first to last
was always seeking the logical, philosophical, and scientific bases of
things. And meanwhile thereby
“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.
La Farge had evidently heard of Japanese art in Paris, for in 1863 he
began collecting Japanese prints, sending directly to Japan for them.
He records that he imported at that time many for himself and his
friend Bancroft. He was interested not only in their linear patterns
but in their color relations, particularly as shown in landscape. He
was painting landscapes at this time and working out-of-doors.
“My programme was to paint from nature a portrait and yet to make
distinctly a work of art which should remain as a type of the sort of
subject I undertook.”
Almost the whole of his theory of art lies in that sentence. It will
apply to his painting of water-lilies as well as to his figures or
landscapes. He was after a type of the species--something typical
and universal rather than something odd or singular. Perhaps the
most notable result of his theory and practice at this time was the
landscape called “Paradise Valley,” painted between 1866 and 1868.
The material for the “Paradise Valley” was found along the Rhode Island
coast near Newport. It is a bare, almost treeless, scene, looking down
toward the sea, and is cut up somewhat in the middle distance by the
angle lines of stone fences. There is nothing about it of “the view,”
nothing that a Hudson River painter would have looked at the second
time; yet La Farge added beauty to its bare truth in such degree that
it became a masterpiece. All of the painter’s studies in light and line
were put into it and yet kept from attracting too much attention in the
exposition. And all of the infinite variety of tone and color common to
the Atlantic shore landscape were added and blended together as one.
The type as a whole emerged--the universal came out of the commonplace.
A more perfect piece of work, a more beautiful picture of landscape,
had not then, and has not since, been produced in American art. Of its
kind it is unequalled.
[Illustration: _Copyright by John La Farge._
“Paradise Valley,” by John La Farge.
In the Collection of General Thornton K. Lothrop.]
The last time I saw this landscape was many years ago at an exhibition
in the gallery of the Century Club. It held the place of honor on the
wall, and I was looking at it, praising it unstintedly to a friend
standing beside me. After I had exhausted my adjectives, I became aware
of some one in the room behind me. I turned and saw La Farge standing
there. Whether or not he had overheard me I did not know, but there
being nothing to conceal, I told him just what I had been saying to
my companion. He smiled and bowed and seemed greatly pleased. He was
always too polite to question the compliments of his admirers, and much
too broadminded to scoff at praise, however unintelligent he might
think it. But the point of my story is further along.
After his telling me how he came to paint the landscape and what he had
sought to make out of it, I asked him why he had not continued with
work of that kind--why he had not painted more Paradise Valleys. His
answer was that he had done a number of landscapes similar in character
but that no one seemed to care for them. There was no audience, no
demand for them, and, worst of all, no one would buy them. He was
forced to do something that would produce a revenue. That seemed to me
at the time deplorable, but perhaps it was not all sheer loss to art,
for his lack of pecuniary success with easel pictures probably had much
to do with his taking up mural decoration and glass-work.
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.