Some Notes on the Art of John La Farge

IT is always a delicate task to write an appreciation, for his own countrymen, of the work of any living artist past fifty. Introduction seems unnecessary, if not impertinent, criticism foolish, praise absurd. In the case of Mr. John La Farge, however, circumstances have conspired to render the temptation to write irresistible. While Mr. La Farge has received the signal honor of being the first foreigner who has been invited to make a “one man ” exhibition in connection with the Salon of the Champ de Mars, comparative study has been made easy by the display, at Durand -Ruel’s in New York, of the collection of water-colors and oils destined for Paris, and also of some of the artist’s older flower-pieces. Thus it becomes at once interesting, if not imperative, and possible to inquire into the qualities of this art which eminent French painters wish to introduce to the notice of their countrymen.

As we know it, Mr. La Farge’s art falls into several distinct groups, held together by consistent principles and the “ personal note ” pervading them all. There is the artist’s easel work in oils, his work as a flower-painter in water-colors, his work in mural decoration and in glass, and last, but not least, his work as a traveler. It is as a traveler and an artist in glass that Mr. La Farge has been invited to exhibit in Paris. It is therefore mainly on these two lines that my comments on his work will be based.

What need is there for further comment on the work in glass of Mr. La Farge ? The mastery of his material, the charm of his color, his rank as a colorist, his knowledge of the decorator’s craft, his originality as an inventor, meet unquestioned recognition. What further remains to say ? Only this, perhaps : that the recognition is often given in an offhand way, without any feeling for the real value of decorative art (which, when serious, is nothing less than monumental art ; that is, the greatest of all art), or for the real importance of color in the life of to-day. It is here that sympathy with and observation of things outside the narrow domain of critical formulas applied in art galleries have, I think, proved themselves specially valuable to the student of art problems. There can be no doubt that the sense of color, so long starved and stultified from a variety of causes, social, artistic, industrial. and moral, is beginning to reassert itself. This is manifested in two ways. There is a growing tendency to handle color in decoration, if not with the unfailing knack and evident joy of the great coloristic epochs and nations, at least with some right understanding of principles and some feeling for the results to be obtained. Much of this is doubtless due to training; some of it to the conscious work of rehabilitation, begun half a century ago by Gottfried Semper and Owen Jones ; more, perhaps, to the opportunities for study of the practice of the East, the rich color-symphonies of India and Persia and the unsurpassed poems in color of the Japanese, — sweet and peaceful, light and airy, gleefully symbolical or joyously brilliant, but always appealing, in their color combination alone, to something beyond the mere pleasure of the senses. It is interesting to speculate, in regarding this combination, upon what the probable or possible effects might have been if all this influx of new art forms and conceptions had taken place in a period of concentration instead of a period of expansion and sympathetic intellectual curiosity. As it is, it has taken place in a period not only of expansion, but of fermentation, of which the ultimate results are beyond our ken. No one can doubt the receptive attitude of mind, however. A certain amount of training in such delicate matters as æsthetic perception and æsthetic demands has thus become possible. But training would have been of no avail, if the aptitude had not been lying dormant, and the craving ready to awaken. There is a real demand for color ; crude, distorted, misunderstood, misdirected in many ways, listening to many false prophets, but unmistakably there. It goes with our love of nature, which, from the sentimental, is passing into the joyous, spontaneous, healthy stage ; with the love of the external world for its own beautiful sake, that generally goes by the name of paganism, which is only the natural outcome of this century of great discoveries and increased knowledge of the inexhaustible beauties of nature. In this respect Mr. La Farge’s work in glass is of peculiar significance. While it gives the deep, often grave sensuous joy craved by the quickened pulse of the time, by our growing conviction of the beauty of God’s creation, it is itself largely inspired by and built on the discoveries of science within the domain of optics. These were not so easily accessible as they are now, in handbooks and treatises, when Mr. La Farge was first attracted by them; but some books there were, and some articles in periodicals, which helped him and his chosen friend along in their speculations. Most of the artist’s wonderful effects are obtained by his study of the phenomena of polarization and of interference (especially as shown in opalescent media), and his thorough knowledge of the nature of complementary contrast. In glass this tells in two ways : contrast always serves to enhance color, giving both richer glow and deeper significance ; the use of the complementary color instead of shading by means of shadows and modeling preserves, nay enriches, the quality of the glass, which would be dulled or impoverished by any attempt at modeling by painting on the glass. This knowledge, this scientific basis, would be of no avail, however, if the material were poor or the artist lacking in intuition. We all know that in Mr. La Farge’s work scientific interest has only served, never chilled, the strong, warm, thrilling artistic joy of the artist in the handling of color for its own sake ; that it has served, not as a basis for theory only, but as a basis for inventions, which have intensified this joy by the delight of finding, developing, perfecting one’s own material. Mr. La Farge’s work as an artist in glass cannot be ranked too high. It has that excellence, life, and charm which come of inspiration from the material; it is fresh, original, strong, coming as direct from the fountain head of the deep, mystic, and musical charm of translucent color as the early mediæval glass itself; it is a splendid instrument, perfectly fitted to express both the healthy joy of our open-air ideals and the yearning spirituality of our reaction against the crudeness of materialism. It is, to my mind, one of the great artistic utterances of the age, if not of all ages, combining as it does Spiritual tendencies with the last word in material and mechanical progress, in a form to characterize which I must quote a Frenchman’s quaint expression. The Frenchman was M. Tournel, himself an artist and an inventor of glass processes, crippled by poverty and obscurity, while a caustic critic of others, as pursuers of ideals are apt to be. We were speaking of Mr. La Farge’s work, of which he had seen some solitary specimens. He expressed himself with a boundless enthusiasm, which he summed up, as it were, by saying with emphasis, “ Enfin, c’est un verrier! ”

We must not leave Mr. La Farge’s work without a tribute to the beauty of his line. For reasons given above, and also because quality in line is more recondite than quality in color, it does not appeal to the general public as much as his color. But it is there, nevertheless ; the hand of the master of the Pied Piper of Hamelin has gained, not lost, in cunning, by attacking the intricate problems involved. For those who have not made a special study of Mr. La Purge’s leadlines, I will add that his problem has been threefold. The leading had to be elevated to the dignity of line, helping out the design, not criss-crossing it ; in this respect Mr. La Farge goes back to the best traditions of the art of glass. To an artist of Mr. La Purge’s temper this line had to be intrinsically good, as a pattern only, irrespective of anatomy, drawing, or handling of the subject; it had also to follow the forms of the pieces of glass, as made necessary by the modulation of color.

To proceed to Mr. La Farge’s work as a traveler. His painting here falls into two distinct groups : his Japanese pictures, painted in 1886, and the sketches and water-colors which he brought home from his one year’s sojourn in the South Seas. His Japanese work at once brings up for discussion some very interesting points. It is evident to all that this work is different in character, and perhaps in artistic aim, from the quick, direct renderings of atmosphere, water, color, motion, life, on the islands of Hawaii, Samoa, and Tahiti. To many it is less interesting. Nor does it all profess to be important. Much of it is of the kind which appeals only to those who care for notes of technical skill, and evidences of an inquisitive artistic temperament. Nearly all of it has, at first sight, a curious strangeness, which neither shocks nor fascinates, quiet and reserved, and without the piquant charm of exoticfairyland. This strangeness, which we all feel, though we may interpret it differently, is due to the fact, I believe, that the artist has looked at his subjects through the medium of his intelligence. In the South Sea Islands, perhaps especially in Hawaii, he has been the painter only ; looking for color, line, motion, atmosphere ; giving poetry and character incidentally, though in no unstinted measure. In his Japanese things he is a painter, but he has looked at nature, it would seem, in an entirely different way ; very much in the same way, I fancy, as Theodore Rousseau looked at the forest of Fontainebleau, quietly, profoundly, with certain intellectual musings on the character of the scene that somehow get into the picture, and impress the chance and hurried spectator as strange, while the student finds more and more of these nursings revealed to him the more he studies the picture. This is synthesis in painting, indeed, if it is still possible to use this much-abused word in a deep and comprehensive sense. This synthesis of the characteristics of a country would hardly be possible without study and assimilation of the artistic traditions of the country when they have found an utterance in art. Naturalistic representations of Holland, whether impressionist or otherwise, might be made without any reference to the artistic traditions of Holland ; it is impossible to conceive a synthetic representation of Dutch landscape — a representation, that is, which aims at summing up the characteristics of the landscape and the artist’s impressions of its peculiar poetry — that would not be deepened and strengthened by the study of Ruysdael, Holbein, and Cuyp. So Mr. La Farge has imitated, or rather assimilated Japanese art. In this direction goes one of his most ambitious and interesting efforts exhibited here, the large oilpainting of Kuwannon. Let us listen to Mr. La Farge himself, in his notes of travel appended to the New York catalogue, to hear how he has conceived the subject: —

“ And here, again, the intense silence, broken by the rush of the waterfall, recalled the pictures of Kuwannon, whose meaning and whose images bring back to me the Buddhistic idea of Compassion. The god, or goddess, as more often depicted, seated in abstraction by the falling waters of life, represents, I suppose, more especially an ideal of Contemplation, and the name used to be said to mean Dominus Contemplationis — I spare you the original Indian name.”

It is here the poetic idea, not the means of expression, that has been assimilated. The execution is in our artistic idiom. There is no attempt at Japanesque treatment. The flow of line is absorbed in the color and tone of the oils ; there is complete modeling of the body ; the personality is Aryan. The whole thing is one of the most interesting attempts at translation that I have seen, full of passages of quality, of beauty in tone, of a kind of prismatic poetry of color. The goddess is robed in delicate pink against the rich tender green and white of the grass and waterfall. A halo plays round her head ; light is diffused everywhere. As a translation, however, this picture is not successful ; the deep poetry conceived by the artist fails somehow to reach us. It is one of the great might-have-beens, which we cannot call melancholy because they are so supremely interesting, as showing the intellectual curiosity, the desire for sympathetic assimilation of our time.

I have left myself but little space to speak of Mr. La Farge’s South Sea Island sketches. Much might be said about the difference of treatment of the different localities, varying with the mood of the artist, the opportunities for study, the difference in salient characteristics as felt and seen by him, with his rare combination of penetrative insight and prompt artistic vision. Some notes must suffice to suggest my meaning. Thus he shows us in Hawaii the impressive mystery of nature as seen at dawn from mountain tops, or from the inner slopes of twilight craters with sulphurous vapors rising into the evening sky ; in Samoa, the charm of rhythm in motion, of the expressiveness of hands, of a rhetoric of the human body as a means of expression which belongs to all the line arts at once, allied to the “ enchantment of the South Seas ” shown in simple open-air life, in beauty of nature and kindliness of climate ; in Tahiti, a perfect fairyland of ideal yet convincing loveliness, poetry, and grandeur of sea and sky, atmosphere and reflections, of weird moonlight and intense afterglow, of sunlit films of rain seen between palms and guava-trees, of mountain quietude in the suggestive tropical gloaming, — a whole gamut of impressions, varying from the most serious to the most exquisitely delicate, together composing a poem of all the deepest and choicest themes of nature, expressed in perfect pictorial language.

At the risk of being prosy, I must add here, to modify this word “ perfect,” that not all these sketches can lay claim to equal pictorial importance. Mr. La Farge is too much of an observer and a chercheur to be always making pictures. Some words of the preface to the New York catalogue may be quoted here : —

“ According to my interest at the moment, I made these drawings and paintings with more or less attention to some special point; either tone or local color, or drawing of form or of motion. It would please me if my studies were looked at as they were by my good friends called savages. Very much as cultivated painters might, they looked at my pictures in the way best suited to help the illusion, — sometimes from near, sometimes from very far, in strong light or in shadow ; in whatever way they thought the special case required.”

In conclusion, I should like to say, in connection with what I have said above about Mr. La Farge’s glass as an expression of the art feeling of our times, that if ours is an age of globe-trotters, idle gatherers of superficial impressions, it is also an age when travel has helped to strengthen and confirm one of our deepest tendencies, the intense intellectual sympathy and wakeful curiosity, cognizant of deeper issues, of our century. There are many globe-trotters among painters. There are not many La Forges.

Cecilia Waern.