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. He served as president of the National Society of Mural Painters from 1899 to 1904. In 1904, he was one of the first seven artists chosen for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
La Farge was born in New York City to wealthy French parents, Jean Frédéric "John Frederick" La Farge and Louise Joséphine "Louisa" La Farge (née Binsse de Saint-Victor), and was raised bilingually. As a child, he and his brothers produced a handmade magazine in French entitled Le Chinois.
His interest in art began during his studies at Mount St. Mary's University in Maryland and St. John's College (now Fordham University) in New York. He studied law. His first visit to Paris in 1856 induced him to study painting with Thomas Couture, and become acquainted with an artistic and literary social circle. La Farge's earliest drawings and landscapes showed marked originality, especially in the handling of color values.
La Farge returned from Europe in October 1857, which ended his relationship with Couture. He returned to continue his law studies although, in his own words, at the same time "stealing as much time as I could for some of my new friends, the painters and architects." These included William James Stillman, George Henry Boughton, and members of the second generation of the Hudson River School. These circumstances changed with the death of his father in June 1858: the pressure to attend law school was gone, and there was a significant inheritance which gave him the freedom to take studio space in the newly created Tenth Street Studio Building at 51 West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. The building's communal spaces for artists set the conditions for social networking; its central atrium and traditional Saturday receptions were important in the careers of its tenants, and to the artistic reputation of the Village. Its architect Richard Morris Hunt recommended that La Farge study under his brother William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island. The artist Hunt was also a product of Couture's atelier.
Between 1859 and 1870, La Farge took up illustration, with Tennyson's Enoch Arden and Robert Browning's Men and Women, and worked on children's magazine illustrations with engraver Henry Marsh (American, 1826–1912).
In the 1870s, La Farge began to paint murals, which became popular for public buildings as well as churches. His first mural was painted in Trinity Church, Boston, in 1873. Then followed his decorations in the Church of the Ascension (the large altarpiece) and St. Paul's Chapel, New York. In his lunette mural Athens at Bowdoin College Museum of Art, a building designed by Charles Follen McKim, the model for the central figure was the African-American muse Hettie Anderson. (Anderson also owned one of his paintings of Samoa.) He also took private commission from wealthy patrons (e.g. Cornelius Vanderbilt) and was reputedly worth $150,000 at one point. La Farge continued to create murals through his career: for the Minnesota State Capitol at St. Paul, at age 71, he executed four great lunettes representing the history of law. Also among his final works were six murals on the theme of eminent lawgivers, beginning with Moses, for the Baltimore City Court House, now the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse.
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 and Fiji. In Hawaii in September 1890 he painted scenic spots on Oahu and traveled to the Island of Hawaii to paint an active volcano. These travels are extensively recounted in his book Reminiscences of the South Seas, and in Adams' letters.
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 (although he retained his National Academy membership). 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. He served as president of the National Society of Mural Painters from 1899 to 1904. In 1904, he was one of the first seven artists chosen for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. La Farge also received the Cross of the Legion of Honor from the French Government.
In 1875, 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. His work rivaled the beauty of medieval windows and added new resources by his use of opalescent glass and by his original methods of layering and welding the glass, which created a sense of three-dimensionality. Opalescent glass had been used for centuries in tableware, but it had never before been formed into flat sheets for use in stained-glass windows and other decorative objects. For his early endeavors, La Farge had had to custom-order flat sheets of opalescent glass from a Brooklyn glass manufacturer.
La Farge filed a patent application on Nov. 10, 1879, shortly after a newspaper account praised a recent window he made for Richard Derby of Long Island as "the first application of a new material [opalescent glass] to windows." He was granted patent no. 224,831 on February 24, 1880, for a "Colored-Glass Window", with technical details about manufacturing opalescent sheet glass and layering it to create windows.
Among La Farge's many stained-glass works are windows at:
Union Baptist Church of Baltimore (Baltimore) (1906)
Trinity Church, Boston (1877–78)
Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina (1881)
Samuel J. Tilden House, NYC (1881; building converted into the National Arts Club in 1906)
Thomas Crane Public Library, Quincy, Massachusetts (c. 1882)