John La Farge

John La Farge (March 31, 1835 – November 14, 1910) was an American artist whose career spanned illustration, murals, interior design, painting, and popular books on his Asian travels and other art-related topics. La Farge made stained glass windows, mainly for churches on the American east coast, beginning with a large commission for Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston in 1878, and continuing for thirty years. La Farge designed stained glass as an artist, as a specialist in color, and as a technical innovator, holding a patent granted in 1880 for superimposing panes of glass. That patent would be key in his dispute with contemporary and rival Louis Comfort Tiffany.

La Farge rented space in the Tenth Street Studio Building at its opening in 1858, and he became a longtime presence in Greenwich Village. In 1863 he was elected into the National Academy of Design; in 1877 he co-founded the Society of American Artists in frustration at the National Academy's conservatism. In 1892 La Farge was brought on as an instructor with the Metropolitan Museum of Art Schools to provide vocational training to students in New York City. and was raised bilingually. He also took private commission from wealthy patrons (e.g. Cornelius Vanderbilt) and was reputedly worth $150,000 at one point.

During an 1880s renovation of the Samuel J. Tilden Mansion, now home to the National Arts Club, La Farge was one of several artisans hired by lead architect Calvert Vaux. He created stained glass panels for the interior of the mansion which remain today.

La Farge traveled extensively in Asia and the South Pacific, which inspired his painting. He visited Japan in 1886 in the company of Henry Adams in the aftermath of the suicide of Adams' wife; there, La Farge began a lifelong friendship with Kakuzō Okakura. Again in Adams's company, he visited the South Seas in 1890 and 1891, in particular spending time absorbing the culture of Samoa, Tahiti La Farge began experimenting with problems of shifting and deteriorating color, especially in the medium of stained glass. At this time, stained glass had not yet been widely adopted as a medium in the United States, making his early efforts critical to its success. Church of St. Joseph of Arimathea in Greenburgh, New York (1883) Blessed Sacrament Church, Providence, Rhode Island The church was designed by George Lewis Heins and Christopher Grant La Farge, LaFarge's brother-in-law, and his eldest son. https://library.bc.edu/lafargeglass/exhibits/show/descriptions/st-john/blessed-sacrament Christ Church in Lincoln, Rhode Island (1884) Trinity Episcopal Church in Buffalo, New York (1886–89) St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University, NYC (1888–99) All Saints Episcopal Church, Briarcliff Manor, New York (1889) All Souls Unitarian Church, Roxbury, Massachusetts First Unitarian Church of Detroit (1890) St. Mary's-in-Tuxedo Episcopal Church, Tuxedo Park, New York (1890) The Cathedral of All Saints, Albany, New York (c. 1890) Judson Memorial Church, NYC (1890–93) First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia (1891) Caldwell Sisters' chapel, Newport, Rhode Island, re-located to Our Lady of Mercy Chapel at Salve Regina University in Newport (1891) Mount Vernon Church, Boston (c. 1893) Church of the Ascension, Episcopal, (Manhattan) Church of the Transfiguration, Episcopal, New York City (1898) John Harvard Window, Southwark Cathedral, London, England (1907) First Congregational Church of Natick, Natick, Massachusetts

Several of his windows, including Peonies Blown in the Wind (1880), are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Dispute with Tiffany

La Farge apparently introduced Tiffany to the new use of opalescent glass sometime in the mid-1870s, showing him his experiments.

Writing

La Farge's writings include:

The American Art of Glass (a pamphlet) Considerations on Painting (New York, 1895) An Artist's Letters from Japan (New York, 1897) The Great Masters (New York) Hokusai: a talk about Japanese painting (New York, 1897) The Higher Life in Art (New York, 1908) One Hundred Great Masterpieces Reminiscences of the South Seas (1912) The Gospel Story in Art (New York, 1913) Letters from the South Seas (unpublished) Correspondence (unpublished)

His papers, together with some of those of certain children and grandchildren, are held by Yale University Library.