La Farge was born of wealthy, cultured French emigre‚ parents who maintained a home in the Washington Square area of New York. As a child he received his first lessons in drawing from his maternal grandfather, a painter of miniatures, and had some lessons in watercolor painting from an unidentified Englishman while a student at the Columbia Grammer School. Beginning in 1850 he attended Mount Saint Mary's College, Emmitsburg, Maryland, and Saint John's College (now Fordham University) in New York, graduating from the Maryland college in 1853. He then took up the study of his intended profession, the law, in New York. However, he also began to study painting. By April 1856, when he left for a year-and-a-half's stay abroad, he had turned his mind to the pursuit of the arts. He was first in Paris, where he studied briefly with Thomas Couture, copied in the Louvre, and met Parisian intellectual leaders including Jean-L‚on G‚r"me, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. He also visited Brittany, Belgium, and Denmark before returning to New York in 1857.
Within a few months La Farge had taken a studio in the newly- erected Tenth Street Studio Building, although he also was practicing law as a means of livelihood. The architect, Richard Morris Hunt, encouraged him to give up the law and turn his full attention and talents to art, which he did in the spring of 1859 by going to Newport, Rhode Island, for further art instruction from the architect's brother, William Morris Hunt. The next three years were taken up in study and an independent effort to master landscape and still life painting; travel; and the complicated matter of persuading Margaret Mason Perry, a daughter of the prominent naval family, to convert to Catholicism and marry him.
These events occurred late in 1860, and the following year, happily settled in Newport, La Farge began his first productive period of painting, his primary subject being flower still lifes. The annual exhibition of 1862 marked his debut at the Academy with a decorative study of water lillies, and a portrait study.
La Farge's activities over the next fifteen years defined the principal focuses of his life. While continuing to paint in Oil, he took up the watercolor medium, becoming a member of the American Society of Painters in Watercolor in 1868; and began increasingly to accept commissions to execute architectural decorative work. In 1874 he essayed his first (initially unsuccessful) designs for stained glass windows. Parallel to his practice as an artist was his role as writer and lecturer. Long interested in Japanese art, he began to collect it in 1863; in 1870 his "Essay on Japanese Art" was published. In 1871 La Farge was appointed university lecturer in composition in art at Harvard College. In 1875 he was a member of the committee to establish the school of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.
A major turning point in La Farge's career came in 1876 when he began his participation in the designing of the decoration of H. H. Richardson's Trinity Church in Copley Square, Boston. His principal assignment was the stained glass, but the project was intentionally a cooperative venture, much in the spirit of the interlocking of the plastic arts as practiced in the Renaissance. A co-worker on Trinity Church was the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens with whom La Farge would execute a number of joint commissions. La Farge had begun manufacturing stained glass shortly before the Trinity commission, but it gave impetus to his experimentation in the medium he would bring to new heights in beauty and technology.
From the late 1870s, although he would continue to execute easel paintings and many watercolors, La Farge gave his primary attention to the designing and execution of mural and, especially, stained glass decorative schemes for private homes, churchs, and public buildings. A selection of these demonstrates the ever-increasing prestige of his commissions: 1879, a peony window for Newport home of John P. Marquand; 1880, decorations for the dining room of the Union League Club, New York; 1881, windows and decorations for Vanderbilt family mansions in New York; 1893 (installed 1898), a mural for Bowdoin College, Brunswick Maine; 1896, the skylight for the Vanderbilt mansion, "The Breakers," Newport; 1900, windows for the Wellesley (Massachusetts) College Chapel; 1904-05, murals for the Supreme Court Room, Minnesota State Capitol; 1906-07, murals for the Baltimore (Maryland) Court House, and windows for the Columbia University Chapel, New York.
Two major travel excursions reflect the adventurousness of La Farge's intellect, as well as aesthetic sensibility. In June 1886, in company with his life-long friend, Henry Adams, La Farge made a six-month's tour of Japan, which resulted in paintings, and "An Artist's Letters from Japan," serialized in Century Magazine, 1890-93. A full year, 1890-91, was passed--again with Adams's company--in touring the islands of the South Pacific, with stops in Australia, Ceylon and Java. This trip led to an ambitious body of paintings in oil and watercolor, based on sketchs and photographs made on the sites, that were exhibited at Doll and Richards Gallery, Boston, and Durand-Ruel, New York, in 1895.
La Farge continued a highly-regarded lecturer and author. In 1893 he was appointed instructor in color and composition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and delivered a series of six lectures there on "Considerations on Painting." His six Scammon Lectures on the subject of the Barbizon School painters, delivered at the Art Institute of Chicago, were published in McClure's Magazine. That journal also published in serial his "One Hundred Masterpieces" between 1903 and 1908. The esteem in which La Farge was held as an intellectual was testified by the honorary degrees awarded him by Yale University in 1896 and 1901, and by Princeton University in 1904.
La Farge had a long, but not altogether peaceful relationship with the Academy. The early rumblings of dissent among certain artists, which eventually led to the creation of the Society of American Artists, might be heard in La Farge's letter to the Academy Council in 1874 in which he complained about the rejection of his works for the annual exhibition. La Farge was among the founding members of the Society, participated in its first exhibition in 1878, and later served as its president. Having hardly missed a year since 1862, his last appearance in an Academy annual exhibition was 1879. But he was certainly reconciled with the Academy by the time the two organizations merged in 1906. Perhaps not coincidentally, La Farge donated a set of books, "the complete literary works of John La Farge," to the Academy in that year. In 1907 he was recommended by the once-offending Council for a professorship of decorative arts at Columbia University. La Farge, in turn, showed his magnaminity in bequeathing a number of casts to the Academy.
In rememberance of this long history of affiliation, the Academy Council entered the following tribute to La Farge in its minutes of November 21, 1910.
Resolved, That the Officers of the National Academy of Design, who are also the Officers of the Society of American Artists, desire to register their sense of the loss to the United Body in the death of John La Farge, a highly honored member of the Academy, who was also president of the Society of American Artists for many years, and until the union of the two Societies. Whether as a painter, a writer, or a man of subtle intellect and wide culture, he was one who reflected credit upon the profession of Art, and who did, prehaps, more than any man of his generation to place that profession, in the eyes of the world, among intellectual pursuits worthy of occupying the attention of serious minds.
