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.
[Illustration: “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.
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.”
[Illustration: “The Three Kings,” by John La Farge.
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.]
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.
To say that one prefers La Farge’s travel books to his travel sketches
is not to disparage the sketches, for the books were extraordinarily
good. He had a great admiration for Fromentin’s _Une Année dans le
Sahel_, and perhaps that volume had not a little to do in suggesting
the form of the volumes on Japan and the South Seas. They are
impressionistic in that they record moods, thoughts, and talks that
make up a quite perfect text for his sketches. They are both grave and
gay, profound and volatile, forceful and yet charming. La Farge had the
literary sense quite as much as the pictorial, and had he chosen to
make a profession of letters he would perhaps have risen to as great a
height as he did in painting.
While a student under Hunt at Newport he became well acquainted with
Henry James, whom he later on advised to take up literature. In the
light of subsequent achievement that must be regarded as good advice,
and yet James had the pictorial cast of mind and might have made a
fine painter. At any rate, some of his best work in writing was his
criticism of painting. La Farge, too, with a mind pictorially inclined,
put out some of his best thoughts in a book of art criticism entitled
_Considerations on Painting_. It was delivered originally as lectures
to art students, but it must have shot far over their little heads.
It is too profound to be grasped at once and often requires a second
reading to apprehend the meaning, but it is the best piece of art
criticism put forth in America. In kind and excellence it ranks with
Fromentin’s _Les Maîtres d’autrefois_--the classic of the craft.
Fromentin was about the only writer on art that La Farge cared for. He
was kind enough to send me a copy of his _Considerations on Painting_
when it was published, and later, in talking over the book with him,
he took occasion to remark (as afterward in print) that he had read
thousands of pages of art criticism “without finding anything that a
person seriously devoted to his profession of art could find of the
slightest use.” At the time I ventured to suggest to him that aid
to artists was not the object of art criticism, that an attempt to
instruct professionals would argue greater knowledge in the critic
than in the artist and be presumptuous, that the critic wrote for
the public and thought to be of service by calling attention to
and explaining certain things that might otherwise be overlooked
or misjudged. Moreover, it was suggested that the writer, too, had
his design and pattern in words which he was trying to work out
artistically and decoratively, and that the subject, whether criticism,
history, poetry, or fiction, was of as little importance with him
as with the painter. Ruskin in art criticism, Newman in sermons and
lectures, and Carlyle in history and essay were possibly greater
artists than Dickens and Thackeray in fiction.
There was nothing new about that to La Farge, but he acquiesced in it
by bowing and smiling a little, especially over Ruskin, for whom he
came as near having contempt as for any one. Not only Ruskin’s ideas
but his vehemence of style were not to La Farge’s fancy. He wrote in
no such hectic vein in his _Considerations on Painting_. The whole
treatise is an inquiry, not an argument, and through it all you feel
the evenly poised, well-balanced mind that is weighing the question and
is not to be stampeded by rhetoric or eloquence of any kind. He was
too intelligent for enthusiasm or emotion. He thought out everything
very calmly, and in the midst of conviction often doubted or questioned
his own conclusions. It was his normal attitude of mind--a mind that
indulged in subtleties, that saw as many meanings in a problem as a
rug-weaver’s eye sees colors in a pattern of tapestry. It was the
attempt to put these subtleties in parenthesis that sometimes makes his
_Considerations on Painting_ hard reading, and yet no one would wish
them deleted. They are side-lights that illumine the quest. The book is
an epitome of La Farge’s method of thinking and is a type of its kind
in literature as truly as his “Paradise Valley” is a type in painting.
As for the philosophic mind, he practically describes himself in one
passage in an article in _Scribner’s Magazine_[10] on the “Teaching of
Art.” It is worth quoting:
“The noblest of all the gifts of the great institutions of learning is
a certain fostering of elevation of mind. It is not so much by what he
knows that the man brought under the trainings of the great academies
is marked; it is by his acquaintance with the size of knowledge; with,
if I may say so, the impossibility of completing its full circle; with
the acquaintance of the manners of enlarging his boundaries; with
the respect of other knowledge than his own; with a certain relative
humility as compared with the narrower pride of him who knows not the
size of the spaces of the world of knowledge. And such an attitude of
mind, such an elevation above petty prides, such a belief in something
larger than one’s self, such an openness to the world, is the privilege
of a full artistic development.”
[10] _Scribner’s Magazine_, vol. 64, page 181.
La Farge as a painter, as an inventor of precious glass, as an
illustrator of Oriental life, as a writer of books, was a great
success; as a student, a man of learning, a philosopher and a talker
he was not less so. He had been born of cultivated parents and all his
life had been saturated with the intellectual. He knew how to think,
weigh, and judge matters, and he knew how to express himself in paint,
in letters, and in words. His mental poise was remarkable for its
stability, though he was not stubborn and was always open to new light.
His conversation was serious, and his manner grave, courteous, calm as
that of a French academician. Certain eccentricities--mental habits
that indicated the questioner--were peculiar to him, and Henry Adams,
his travelling companion, was led to speak of him as a wonderful mind
and a wonderful contradiction. By that, perhaps he meant that La Farge
always stopped short of the positive conclusion. He guarded himself
with qualifying clauses, as though conscious of another side to the
question.
His talk was quite as delightful as his books. He had read almost
everything, knew almost every one in the modern art world, and his
fund of information seemed as exhaustless as his charm of manner. And
yet withal he was rather a shy man and had to be sought out. For many
years he dined regularly at the Century Club, and more often alone than
with company. If any one sat opposite to him at his little table, the
chances were two to one that the visitor was self-invited. He held as
intimates for many years Clarence King, John Hay, and Henry Adams. They
must have proved a rare quartet of wits around a dinner-table, for all
of them were exceptionally brilliant talkers. But I never heard of a
fifth at the table.
Honors had come to La Farge from the beginning. He had received medals
and prizes and degrees, he wore the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole,
was president of the Society of American Artists, and an initial member
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He took them all very
calmly. They were recognitions that he did not despise; neither did he
count them as crowns of glory. His well-poised mind, with its Oriental
sympathies, could rise above praise, and yet he was human enough to
like it. When the gold medal of the Architectural League was presented
to him he startled the honor-bearers by suggesting that it was late in
coming. That was not so much egotism as the bald truth, and he could
not refrain from pointing it out.
La Farge had never been physically robust, and during his latter years
he had known much illness. There were periods when he was totally
incapacitated and could do no more than lie still. He took that
calmly, too. He was a philosopher always and made the best of things.
Perhaps that is the reason why with his frail body he lived on to
seventy-four, not dying until November, 1910. He lived his character to
the last, and when he died the painter-world, if no other, knew that a
master mind as well as a master craftsman had passed out.
In the arts he was our first great scholar and spoke as one having
authority. With his learning, his imagination, and his skill he gave
rank to American art more than any other of the craft. For that reason
he is to-day hailed as master and written down in our annals as
belonging with the Olympians. He deserves the title and the separate
niche.
VII
JAMES ABBOTT McNEILL WHISTLER
After considering La Farge, it is difficult to think of Whistler other
than in terms of contrast. They were of the same time, their tastes
were not dissimilar, and many features of their theory and practice
were in agreement; but Whistler’s impetuosity and contentiousness
seem magnified when set over against the gravity and reticence of
La Farge. He had not the latter’s mental poise, nor philosophy, nor
tenacity, nor patience. The seriousness of his art always suffered
from the acrimony of his talk or the cleverness of his writing or the
flare of his conduct. He was a wit, to be sure, but not a wise one;
a brilliant writer but not a profound one; an æsthetic bravo but not
a discreet one. His social activities gave his art a wide notoriety,
but that rather harmed than helped its permanent fame. The mob enjoyed
his caustic utterances but continued to look askance at his symphonies
and nocturnes. What else could have been expected? Art explains itself
or it falls. Talk may make it talked about but does not establish its
final worth.
And so one, at times, wishes that Whistler had said nothing, written
nothing, explained nothing. His art standing alone would eventually
have vindicated itself as did that of Hals and Rembrandt and Velasquez.
There is not the least bit of flippancy or irritability or waspishness
about it. If we knew naught of his life and had never read _The Gentle
Art of Making Enemies_ and the _Ten O’Clock_, we could not have derived
the militant Whistler from his pictures. They are cast in a vein of
decorative beauty and done not only with the greatest seriousness but
with the greatest tranquillity. With their simplicity and largeness of
vision, their fastidiousness of arrangement, their charm of mood and
loveliness of color they would point to an Ariel-like creator who was
in love with color refinements, a devotee of nature’s minor chords,
her shadowy manifestations, her evanescent harmonies. And that would
have been the true Whistler--the Whistler that fame will not allow to
die. But his clarification is still some distance away. Appreciation is
clouded by the presence of the egotist, the dandy, the bitter-tongued
wit, the maker of paradoxes--passing phases of temperament quite aside
from his reckoning as an artist, mental poses forced upon him by
circumstances which he doubtless felt he had to meet and overcome.
That is not to say that the capacity for verbal fisticuffs was not
born in him, though he did not show it in his early days, nor while
a student in Paris. It was only after he took up life in London and
was reviled by British criticism that he stepped outside of his art
to defend himself. Perhaps he took to words as readily as Cellini
to throat-cutting or Goya to bull-fighting, but it was not the less
unfortunate. That Cellini was a bravo and Goya a roysterer and Whistler
a maker of enemies merely suggests that artists may have dual natures
like other people and not be the better for them. Their art is not
improved thereby.
But it is perhaps useless to argue against the admission of the
irrelevant. The world likes it and will have it. That Bacon, Titian,
Goethe were mean in spirit is inconsequent backstairs gossip, but it
is taken as a relish along with their vision and their wisdom. Just
so with Whistler. The present generation of painters thinks his _Ten
O’Clock_ the law and gospel of art, and a dozen biographies of him
record his epigrams and corrosive remarks along with his epoch-making
pictures. We shall have to take the chaff with the wheat.
Perhaps the chief infirmity of Whistler’s make-up was his lack of
patience. Nature had endowed him with a bright, alert mind that flashed
and scintillated but wavered perhaps in continuity of purpose. It
was a true-enough American mind in that at first it balked at effort
and sought to vault over obstacles by bursts of speed or sudden
inspiration. The average American believes more in inspiration than in
work, though as applied directly to Whistler we must not push that
point too far. There were periods when he labored hard but there was no
prolonged patience, no calm philosophy of enduring and biding his time.
As a boy he would never submit entirely to education, and as a young
man the rigor of studio-training fretted him. He took as much of each
as pleased him and let the rest go. He resented guidance and resisted
discipline as more or less of a restraint on individuality.
The story of his birth, family, and early education is told minutely
in the excellent biography by the Pennells.[11] From their account
it appears that Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834.
He was reported to have been born in Baltimore, and he did not deny
the report. “If any one likes to think I was born in Baltimore, why
should I deny it? It is of no consequence to me.” His parents were
refined, educated people, the best that the United States at that time
was capable of producing. His father was a West Point graduate, a
major in the United States army, and, at the time of Whistler’s birth,
an engineer, building locks and canals at Lowell. In 1843 the whole
Whistler family went to Russia, where the father had been called by the
Czar to build the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway. In St. Petersburg the
children were carefully tutored, especially in such polite learning
as the languages and the arts. Whistler was already drawing in a
boyish way, and was no doubt receiving impressions of art from various
sources. In 1847 he was in England for the summer with his mother, and
again in 1849 he went there for the winter because his health could
not stand the Russian climate. In the latter year his father died,
and shortly thereafter Mrs. Whistler, with the children, returned
to America. Whistler the boy was sent to school at Pomfret, and his
mother records that he was still “an excitable spirit with littler
perseverance,” and had “habits of indolence.”
[11] _The Life of James McNeill Whistler_, by E. R. and J. Pennell,
Philadelphia, 1911.
Two years of Pomfret and he was entered as a cadet at the West Point
Military Academy. He remained there three years, and was dropped in
1854 because deficient in chemistry. Besides, he could not remember
dates, and at cavalry drill he had difficulty in keeping on his horse.
These seem slight reasons for dropping his name from the rolls, but the
West Point requirements in those days, as now, were rather rigorous. He
appealed to Washington for reinstatement but was denied. In its place
a job was offered him in the Coast Survey. He accepted and drew on
government maps for some months, resigning in 1855. The same year he
went to Paris to study art and entered the studio of Gleyre, one of the
leading semiclassic painters of the time.