Arts and Letters

John La Farge was a young old man. He was born in New York in March, 1835. His father was a Frenchman, an officer in the navy, who, in 1806, took part in an expedition to Santo Domingo, where he married the daughter of a planter who is said to have had some skill as a miniature-painter. John La Farge married Margaret M. Perry, the granddaughter of Commodore O. H. Perry. In his early life La Farge undertook the study of law; but, always attracted to art, it was not long before he devoted himself wholly to the study of painting. At that time, while in Newport, he studied under William Morris Hunt. The charm of some of his early landscapes, painted there and while he was studying with Couture in Paris, is well remembered by those of us who have seen them at our current exhibitions.

It was in the early seventies that he first began experimenting in glass that afterward resulted in his ingenious and well-known new methods of construction and use of materials, with their accompanying brilliancy of color. His work in this direction made a remarkable impression upon American glass. Through all the years of glass-working he continued to paint, producing many important decorations, more especially in some of our churches. An event in his life was when H. H. Richardson commissioned him to decorate Trinity Church in Boston. Later, his work appeared in the Church of the Ascension, the Church of the Paulist Fathers, the Brick Church, and the St. Thomas's Church that was destroyed by fire.

In 1886, La Farge went to Japan with his friend Mr. Henry Adams, and afterward to the South Sea Islands. His correspondence, which later appeared in the Century Magazine, established him in the minds of the public as a writer of unusual natural ability. In his later work as a literary man he showed an unusual degree of versatility and flexibility of mind. For those of us who know well the extent and unusual quality and merits of the man's talents, it is futile at this time to comment further upon his undertakings, his drawings, his water-colors, his paintings, his glass, or his writings, or to attempt to enumerate the many honors he received during his long and successful life—honors not only from his own country, but from France, England, and Germany. Had we time, we would rather dwell upon him as our friend and fellow-Academician, a remarkable character, an artist-philosopher. Those of us who knew him would agree, I believe, that, when all else had been said, to know him and to talk with him was to find La Farge at his best. He was indeed an artist in conversation, a man of ideas, with as brilliant a coloring in his personality as in his painting. His talk, drawn from his broad experience, was always full of suggestion, delightful in anecdote and incident, with a profound sense of humor, and a literary quality of great refinement unusual even in written form.