La Farge

Many view Trinity as simply a tourist destination, but behind the La Farge stained glass and exemplary Romanesque Revival architecture dwells a healthy, 275-year-old congregation.

American Grace Robert D. Putnam 2010

Strikingly, though he had adopted watercolor as his preferred medium since the 1870s, exploiting its luminous transparency and freshness, La Farge tends to heighten pigment saturation and surface texture in his tropical watercolors by including passages in gouache, the opaque form of watercolor.

The Distant Travels of a Restless Mind Barrymore Laurence Scherer 2010

Less iconic and more conventionally rendered than Gauguin ' s figures, La Farge ' s nevertheless exude great human vitality and warmth.

The Distant Travels of a Restless Mind Barrymore Laurence Scherer 2010

These passages are like counterparts of the opalescent glass and agate-like slag glass that La Farge used in his windows to achieve richly colorful effects with uncommon depth and texture.

The Distant Travels of a Restless Mind Barrymore Laurence Scherer 2010

La Farge ' s many palm-fringed, sparsely peopled landscapes are often composed of horizontal bands of color whose sense of order and clarity recall the Japanese prints that he had collected earlier, while several of the groups of figures in muted earth-tones against the verdant landscape recall the muted neoclassical figural arrangements of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, who, like La Farge, had studied with the French narrative painter Thomas Couture.

The Distant Travels of a Restless Mind Barrymore Laurence Scherer 2010

It had a profound influence on La Farge ' s subsequent work, and the current exhibition at the Yale Art Gallery, " John La Farge ' s Second Paradise, " reveals not only that influence but also a remarkable trove of 53 watercolors and oil paintings, 11 sketchbooks and his stained-glass window of " A Samoan Dancing " c.

The Distant Travels of a Restless Mind Barrymore Laurence Scherer 2010

As the exhibition ' s curator, Elizabeth Hodermarsky, observes in the splendid catalog ' s opening essay, La Farge ' s landscape painting formed the alpha and omega of a career better remembered for its legacy in other genres.

The Distant Travels of a Restless Mind Barrymore Laurence Scherer 2010

As a Westerner, La Farge was fascinated by the region and its peoples, and he documented their physical attributes and their customs with a sympathetic hand.

The Distant Travels of a Restless Mind Barrymore Laurence Scherer 2010

They also represent the carefully documented impressions of a sophisticated traveler: La Farge, who had long since done the grand tour of Europe, as well as Japan, was among the first private tourists to this lush region, rather than a visitor on official business.

The Distant Travels of a Restless Mind Barrymore Laurence Scherer 2010

Unlike Paul Gauguin, who arrived on Tahiti five days after La Farge ' s departure — and who proceeded to paint his beloved Tahitians in his more modernist way as flattened, somewhat stylized figures in an overall design scheme — La Farge painted his islanders naturalistically, according to his keen understanding of human anatomy.

The Distant Travels of a Restless Mind Barrymore Laurence Scherer 2010