John La Farge

One of America’s early artist-intellectuals, John La Farge was an influential mural and easel painter who also invented opalescent glass, which he used to spectacular effect in window designs. In 1877 his decorative scheme for the interior of Boston’s Trinity Church, a colorful and intriguing mix of figurative artwork and pure abstract decoration, was at the forefront of a style and period in American art and design now known as the American Renaissance (1876–1917). During this era, art of the past, particularly of the Italian Renaissance, became a source for the development of an intensely nationalistic American art. La Farge’s work also epitomized the spirit of the aesthetic movement, which emphasized the integration of fine art with decorative art, architecture, and design.

   Reared in a cultivated French-speaking family with close ties to Europe, La Farge abandoned the practice of law at age twenty-four to study painting with the Boston painter William Morris Hunt at his studio in Newport, Rhode Island. La Farge never studied in Europe nor was considered a modernist; however, he often was ahead of his European and American counterparts: he collected Japanese prints before James McNeill Whistler did, created impressionistic landscapes before the first impressionist exhibition took place in France in 1874, and painted in Tahiti a year before the French post-impressionist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) ventured there. La Farge’s artistic experiments were parallel to and had a profound influence on the literary and philosophical works of his childhood friends, the American brothers Henry and William James. La Farge’s cultural background, artistic attitudes, and refined sensibility were in many respects at odds with the dominant tendencies of American life, yet his contributions to American art and culture are irrefutable.