You have almost certainly seen work by John La Farge. If you have ever visited Boston’s Trinity Church, the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, the St. Louis Art Museum, or the Baltimore City Courthouse, his work is there. You may have also noticed him on the calendar of the Episcopal Church’s 2009 resource Holy Women, Holy Men, where he shares a December 16 commemoration with Ralph Adams Cram and Richard Upjohn. But who was he?
La Farge was a prolific artist. He created stained-glass windows for churches of every denomination, as well as for secular institutions and rich homeowners. He also painted scenes with a huge variety of topics, from flowers to Japanese deities, and from easel paintings to murals.
He was also an adulterer who regularly ignored his wife and children. He ignored them to focus on his art, but he was also bad at delivering it. One priest was so annoyed at how long scaffolding had been up in the church with no work being done that he tore it down. A church signed a contract with him, only to discover that he had left that day for a trip of several months to Japan. He had a bitter legal rivalry with Louis Comfort Tiffany over who invented opalescent stained glass. After a dispute with his business partner, in which he hid art he had promised, he was arrested. He was sued by his son and died in significant debt.
La Farge was born in New York to a wealthy French family. His father encouraged his pursuit of art, but told him he would eventually have to give it up and become a lawyer. But when his father died when La Farge was a young man, he no longer had that parental pressure and instead had a large inheritance he could use to jumpstart his artistic career.
He also was able to use his wealth and family connections to mingle with the upper echelons of the American elite, including Margaret Mason Perry, who was descended from Benjamin Franklin and War of 1812 hero Oliver Hazard Perry. The problem that posed was that like many families in Newport, Rhode Island, Margaret’s were devout Episcopalians who strongly opposed Roman Catholicism. They would wed in 1860, in a clandestine Catholic marriage performed by Isaac Hecker, the founder of the Paulist Fathers, and Margaret would convert later that year.
La Farge’s early work was paintings of life in Newport, as well as sketches of his friends and religious and religion-inspired paintings. He was also inspired by Japanese art, which had become extremely popular among Westerners in the 1850s.
By the late 1860s, he was branching out from easel paintings. He provided an illustration for a magazine story of a scene from the Thousand and One Nights, showing a fisherman being horrified when he released a genie. In the 1870s, he started doing murals, including at Boston’s Trinity Church, which was being built. What he really wanted to start doing was stained glass, which he had admired while in Europe. But he could not figure out how to execute it.
At one point during the Trinity Church project, he was sick. While in bed, he began to look at the bottles in his room. He realized that the kind of glass they were made of, known as opalescent, was fascinating. He could create windows that more resembled his paintings. This began his lengthy career in creating stained glass.
His glass was eclectic, and drew on a variety of artistic traditions, from Japanese to Greco-Roman to Byzantine. But this is also what made it popular: it was unique and innovative, and didn’t merely copy European models. Roman Catholic parishes often shied away from commissioning him, preferring more traditional imagery. Protestant churches, however, many of which were newly moving away from their iconoclastic roots, could not get enough of La Farge’s style, and his windows began to appear in the monumental Protestant churches that adorned downtowns across America.
This was also an era of rich civic, university, and home decoration, and La Farge created windows for buildings like Harvard’s Memorial Hall and the public library of Quincy, Massachusetts, as well as for grand homes, like Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Manhattan mansion. La Farge may be the only artist to do both Christian devotional art and paintings of Confucius and Muhammad, which were part of his series of paintings of lawgivers at the new courthouse in Baltimore.
Critics were not always impressed. One said a painting was “a blind muddle of color on a bit of canvas, which might as well have been put into the frame with one side up as with the other.” La Farge lacked the lengthy formal apprenticeship then common, and this was evident in his technique. But this did not stop the public, in the United States and elsewhere, from appreciating his work. Over the decades, he developed a huge following. Isabella Stewart Gardner was so desperate to add a La Farge to her collection that when he refused to sell her one, she simply took one that she wanted from his studio. He also won acclaim for his displays at the best Paris art exhibitions.
He also did travel art. His depictions of the exotic lands of Japan and the South Seas, with images of Buddhist goddesses and chieftains dressed for a war dance, appealed greatly to the fin die siècle American mind.
His prominence is impressive considering his difficulties in keeping his life and business together. La Farge was known for working long days, sometimes of up to 16 hours. But he was also known for being a flighty, disorganized dilettante. He was a perfectionist, but he also regularly overcommitted to projects. He would take years longer to complete a piece of art than comparable artists. He spent lavishly, and declared bankruptcy several times. His wife used an inheritance to purchase a home that was solely in her name, which was not easy for a married woman to do in the 19th century.
Once he did not respond to an invitation to work on the new building of the Library of Congress for several months, and when he did so, he said the price offered by the federal government was too low. The project was accepted by a rival artist, Elihu Vedder.
La Farge told a friend, “I came near to getting some mosaic to do as I was very enthusiastic about it but it slipped over to Vedder in a curious, inexplicable way.” The consequences of his actions and the expectations of others always seemed to bewilder him. His struggles would be compounded later in life when he began using heroin.
What, then, is La Farge’s legacy? It would be easy to say he is not worthy of inclusion on a list of holy women and holy men. Yet his art created a wholly new and uniquely American style of ecclesiastical decoration.
His legacy is not only in his own work but in his descendants. Some of his sons followed in his footsteps of decoration, contributing to buildings like New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the National Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. But the child he named for himself, his last son, chose a different career path: the priesthood.
John LaFarge, S.J., who did not have a clear image of what his father looked like until he was 11, was one of the first American priests to write a book decrying racism against African Americans. When Pope Pius XI wanted someone to help him write an anti-racist encyclical because of his horror at the actions of Hitler and Mussolini, he called LaFarge to Rome.
While it would seem hard to argue he learned much about faith from his father, his life sprang from a young man’s decision to give up his father’s expectation of law school for a career of creating something beautiful. Perhaps that is legacy enough.
Greta Gaffin is a freelance writer based in Boston. She has a master of theological studies degree from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
