John la farge peacock window

John la farge artwork
John la farge stained glass
Addison lafarge

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John La Farge

Artist Biography

John LaFarge was born in New York City, the son of prosperous French emigres, his father having been a refugee from the ill-fated Napoleonic expedition to San Domingo. LaFarge began drawing at an early age, had intermittent instruction, and graduated from the Roman Catholic Mount St. Mary's College in Maryland. In 1856 he went to Europe, worked briefly under the painter Thomas Couture in Paris, and traveled in northern Europe. Returning to the United States, he went to Newport in order to study with William Morris Hunt. There he met William and Henry James (William James was then also a student of Hunt's).

LaFarge was one of the first American artists to import and be influenced by Japanese color prints (1863). He made a trip to Japan with Henry Adams in 1886, later publishing An Artist's Letters from Japan (1897).

In 1876 LaFarge completed a whole complex of mural decorations for Richardson's distinguished Trinity Church in Copley Square, Boston; it was his first large-scale commission. H. H. Richardson won the architectural competition f

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When America was celebrating its centennial year in 2009, Jim McDermott and I wrote a series of articles on notable figures in the magazine’s history, including one on John LaFarge, S.J., a longtime editor (including a four-year stint as editor in chief from 1944 to 1948). Soon after the article’s publication, I received a note from a former Jesuit who had lived with Father LaFarge at America House while pursuing doctoral studies at Columbia University.

He had an embarrassing story to tell. In August of 1963, the rector of the Jesuit community had asked him to accompany the elderly LaFarge to Washington for a civil rights protest. He begged off on the grounds that he had too much academic work to do. A few days later, the front page of The New York Times featured a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his famous “I Have A Dream” speech at the March on Washington. Among the dignitaries sharing the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with Dr. King? John LaFarge, S.J.

The erstwhile graduate student admitted in his note that he had spent the next 46 years kicking himself for his f

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Biography

John La Farge (1835-1910) was born in New York City to a family of French émigrés who had become very successful in America. La Farge was educated in Jesuit schools, including Fordham and Mount Saint Mary’s College in Maryland. He studied law, and received a Master’s degree in 1855. The legal profession did not appeal to him, however, and for a twenty-first birthday present, he began his art training with a year in Europe, where he entered the atelier of Thomas Couture. In 1858 he moved to Newport, Rhode Island to study with William Morris Hunt. There he met Henry James and his brother William, who were also studying with Hunt.

In the 1860s, he began a number of religious paintings that were important to his development, though not commercially successful. In 1877, he was asked to provide the decorative scheme of murals and wall colors for Trinity Church in Boston, which was an early marker for the emerging American Renaissance.

John La Farge reinvented the art of stained glass. In the mid-1870s, he began to experiment with stained glass, inn