Meticulous Mandarin

"He was quite the most interesting person we knew," wrote Novelist Henry James of his friend John La Farge. In fact, La Farge convinced James that he should write rather than paint, then used his brother, Philosopher William, as the model for St. John in an uncompleted altarpiece. La Farge also succeeded in smuggling a touch of the Renaissance back to the U.S., revived the art of stained glass, and visited Tahiti with sketchbook in hand before Gauguin got there. Unlike many of his well-educated countrymen, such as his contemporary Whistler, who became expatriates, La Farge put his talents to embellishing the barren American cultural scene.

It is now 56 years since La Farge died, 30 since his last big memorial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To recall his considerable accomplishments, Manhattan's Graham Gallery is currently showing a retrospective of La Farge's work, from his academic studies of the 1860s to his free, spontaneous washes and water-colors of unspoiled South Sea islands. They go far toward establishing La Farge as one of the originals of his day, an innovator if not a revolutionary, a romantic who opened up his canvases to the influences of all ages, yet imposed on nature a vision of his own.

Wise Men in Newport. La Farge belonged to the genteel tradition. Born in 1835, the son of a Napoleonic soldier of fortune, he was brought up in the aristocratic red-brick atmosphere of New York's Washington Square. At 21, he was sent to Paris, where he studied briefly with the academician Thomas Couture, then hunted down the greatest old masters from Copenhagen to Dresden.

Fascinated by the color theories of the French chemist, Michel Eugene Chevreul, La Farge searched along the same lines that the impressionists were to follow. He wrote: "I wished to apply principles of light and color of which I had learned a little. I wished my studies of nature to indicate very carefully, in every part, the exact time of day and circumstance of light." It was the same route that Monet, slightly his junior in age, was to follow to perfection. In practice, La Farge is more similar to that French loner, Puvis de Chavannes, who also introduced mythological subject matter into naturalistic settings. La Farge, for instance, thought nothing of depicting The Halt of the Wise Men in 1878 with a recognizable Newport, R.I., background.

Gaiety in Paradise. Like Puvis, La Farge became a muralist. In 1876, he was invited by the neo-Romanesque architect, H. H. Richardson, to decorate the interior of his Trinity Church in Boston with 15-ft. figures of the apostles and prophets. Such commissions, plus his close interest in the Pre-Raphaelites, led him to stained glass. He concocted his own kind of opalescent glass, more in the manner of Tiffany than of Chartres. Its milky jewel quality earned him a Legion of Honor from the French and the chance to design windows for the Harvard Chapel in London's Southwark Cathedral.

Overwhelmed with commissions in later life, he took off in 1890 for "a year of recreation and idleness" in the South Seas, visited Samoa, Fiji and Tahiti. His quick sketches, executed on the spot, caught the gaiety and innocence of an as yet unspoiled paradise with verve and masterly handling of light and flashing color. He just missed meeting Gauguin in Tahiti. In practice, La Farge was too much the meticulous mandarin (he loathed shaking hands with strangers) to refer to Gauguin other than as the "wild Frenchman." But his artist's eye easily bridged the gulf.

Writing to Henry Adams, he could say of Gauguin's work: "And yet there is the feeling of a man who has found something." The same could be said of La Farge.

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