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JOHN LA FARGE has given us two avenues of approach to his personality as an artist: one through his pictures, drawings, and decorations, the other through his writings. In the drama of his artistic doings the writings serve as the chorus, which from its platform in front of the actual stage interpolates a commentary on the main action, in language always illuminative, though sometimes of rather complex meaning. For it reflects, in fact, the complexity of its author’s personality, his life-long habit of contemplation and the wide horizon over which his study has roamed, embracing many objects of desire inside and outside his art, to none of which he can tolerate a short cut, but the interdependence of which and the relative interest of the paths thereto, even the inevitable oppositions and compromises, he has always realized and valued. As Paul Bourget happily says, La Farge’s “least words betray the seeker of a kind like Fromentin, who thinks out his sensations—a rare, a very rare power.”

He was a student of art long before he entered upon it as a profession. It attracted him first as a form of culture, the practice coming later; quite an inversion of the usual progress of the art student, who gets manual facility and then culture—sometimes. Nor did art in his early days present the only form of culture. He received a classical training of the thorough sort that promotes an intimacy with classic thought and expression. His father’s house in Washington Square, well stocked with books and pictures, was the rendezvous of cultivated people, many of them émigrés of the French Revolution or refugees from St. Domingo. When he visited Europe in 1856 he stayed in Paris at the home of his relatives, the St. Victors, where lived his bedridden great-uncle, author of many works, historical, critical, and artistic, who had known friends and foes of the French Revolution, had been an émigré in Russia and still retained his interest in all things, even to the theatres. Paul de St. Victor, writer and critic, was La Farge’s cousin, and many remarkable and gifted people came to the house—Russians, members of the Institute, priests, art critics, and literary men, among them Charles Blanc and Théophile Gautier.

La Farge had been taught to draw in a precise, old-fashioned way by his grandfather, Binsse de St. Victor, a miniature painter of some talent, and during his visit to Europe he was advised by his father to study painting under some master, partly as an accomplishment, partly as an escape from a desultory interest in many things. He, therefore, entered the studio of Couture, who, however, recommended him to postpone painting and to study and copy the drawings of the old masters in the Louvre. “With quite a comprehension of my inevitable failure,” he says, “I made drawings from Correggio, Leonardo, and others; but my greatest fascination was Rembrandt in his etchings.” Later he followed the drawings of the old masters in Munich and Dresden, giving up an invitation to accompany Paul de St. Victor and Charles Blanc in a tour of northern Italy. “I have never known,” he writes, “whether I did well or ill, for I cannot tell what the effect upon me might have been of the inevitable impression of the great Italian paintings, seen in their own light and their native place.” He means at that period of his development, for he saw them later. Next he made a short stay in England and became acquainted with the works of the pre-Raphaelites, who did not seem disconnected from the charm of Sir Joshua and Gainsborough, or from the glories of Turner, “which yet offended by its contradiction of the urbanity and sincerity of the great masters whom I cared for most.” But the willingness of the pre-Raphaelites to meet many great problems of colour attracted him and confirmed him in the direction of his own study of colour. However, the most important European developments of that time seemed to him to be represented by Rousseau, Corot, Millet, and Delacroix. On his return to New York he entered a lawyer’s office, for, as he says, “no one has struggled more against his destiny than I; nor did I for many years acquiesce in being a painter, though I learned the methods and studied the problems of my art. I had hoped to find some other mode of life, some other way of satisfying the desire for a contemplation of truth, unbiassed, free, and detached.” His friendship with William Hunt may have decided him in his career, or his marriage in 1860, which established him in Newport, R.I.

This brief summary represents quite a remarkable method of evolution for an artist; one that could not be adopted with impunity by many young men, its very leisureliness offering temptations, of which the least evil result might be dilettanteism. But La Farge was freed from the danger by the possession of moral and mental stamina, the breadth of his sympathies even demanding this gradual development. Nor was it unaccompanied with strenuousness of interest in