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John La Farge
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| Portrait of John La Farge |
Sketch entitled “A Near-Sighted Boy.” |
In 1853 a student at Mount St. Mary’s
College drew sketches of classmates, like the one above, titled
“a near-sighted boy.” Wandering the Catoctin hillsides,
he also sketched landscapes of Frederick County scenes. This
youth, John La Farge, found a love for art there in Frederick
County and grew to become one of the greatest artistic minds
of the 19th century in America. A painter, writer, critic,
thinker, and pioneer, he transformed many fields, including
mural painting, watercolor, illustration and stained glass.
His first mural commission –– a nearly unprecedented
work transforming the interior of architect H. H. Richardson’s
landmark Trinity Church in Boston –– caused a
sensation and won him widespread recognition as one of America’s
leading artists. He had a critical influence on not one but
two major American writers, Henry James and Henry Adams. He
is credited with doing much to establish a strong foundation
for fine art in America.
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| La Farge window "The Angel of Help
window, 1886, courtesy Unity Church of North Easton, MA |
The French sculptor
Bartholdi created his first plans and model for the Statue
of Liberty in LaFarge's New York studio, and used a woman
he met through LaFarge as a model for that most famous of
American sculptures. Bartholdi also married this woman, Jeanne-Emilie
Baheux de Puysieux, at LaFarge's house in Newport, Rhode Island.
LaFarge played a
supervisory role in the creation of perhaps the greatest of
American sculptures, Auguste Saint-Gaudins’ mysterious
and deeply affecting memorial to Henry Adams’ wife,
located in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington D.C. He was an
organizer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and
founder of the Society of American Artists and the Society
of American Mural Painters.
He was, first and foremost, an extraordinary personality.
The great critic Royal Cortissoz said “I have heard
some brilliant conversationalists, Whistler among them,
but I have never heard one remotely comparable to La Farge.” It
was said that at dinner parties, waiters would forget their
service and stand transfixed listening to him talk.
La Farge became
the greatest innovator in modern stained glass history. He
was the first to develop opalescent glass for windows and
pioneered the use of thin copper wire or foil to replace heavy
lead lines, techniques that made possible the work of Louis
Comfort Tiffany. Though Tiffany’s financial resources
and commercial inclinations made him far better known, it
was La Farge who was recognized then and since as the great
innovator in the field.
The Dreaming
pays tribute to LaFarge by using true opalescent glass for
the symbol panels that run down the right side of the work.
The opalescent glass used in The Dreaming was actually
made at the legendary Kokomo glass factory in Kokomo, Indiana,
where both LaFarge and Tiffany secured their glass after it
became a reliable source for them in 1888.
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