John La Farge 1835 - 1910

Telles Gilbert Brouillette, by 1965
Jordan-Volpe Gallery, New York
(Doris Bry, New York)
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Washington D.C., National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, The Carnegie Museum of Art; Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, John La Farge, July 1987-April 1988, no. 8, illustrated in color p. 22
New York, Jordan-Volpe Gallery, Nature Vivante: The Still Lifes of John La Farge, April-June 1995, no. 14, p. 119, illustrated in color pl. 12

In 1861, newlyweds John Frederick Lewis Joseph La Farge and Margaret Mason Perry Lafarge moved into a commodious house in Newport, Rhode Island. La Farge, born in New York City, was a child of privilege and wealth, the eldest son of a French émigré father and French-American mother. He grew up in a bi-lingual household shaped by strong familial and cultural ties to France. His wife was a granddaughter of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, a hero of the War of 1812, and a grandniece of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, who opened the way for trade between America and Japan.

Possessed of well-honed academic skills and a wide-ranging intellect combined with a passion for art, La Farge had, by the time he married, studied art in both New York and Paris. Traveling in Europe in 1856-57, he had copied old masters in the Louvre and, through family connections in Paris, met scores of major literary and artistic figures. On his way home in 1857, he had stopped in Manchester, England, to visit the "Art Treasures of Great Britian" exhibition, whose 16,000 works ranged from ancient art to modern, including the English Pre-Raphaelites.  He had a keen interest in art theory and in 1859 had gone to Newport to study with William Morris Hunt, a star pupil of Thomas Couture.

La Farge's agenda, in 1861 was to explore on his own, in a spirit of scientific inquiry, the effects of color and optic theory as applied to painting in oil. Focusing his scientific experiments in art with indoor flower arrangements, he related his plan to his friend and early biographer, Royal Cortissoz:

. . . I aimed at making a realistic study of painting, keeping to myself the design and attempts, serious or slight, which might have a meaning more than that of a strict copy of nature. I painted flowers to get the relations between the softness and brittleness of the flower and the hardness of the bowl . . . Instead of arranging my subject, which is the usual studio way, I had it placed for my by chance, with any background and any light. . . . You will see that that is a reasonable method of meeting any difficulties that come up in strict painting (as quoted in James L.Yarnall, Nature Vivant: The Still Lifes of John La Farge, 1995, p. 12).

In 1861, the La Farges also rented a summer cottage a mile outside of Newport in rural Middletown. The chief geologic feature of the neighborhood called by the name Paradise is a series of seven rocky ledges, smoothed by pre-historic seas and separated by glacial erosion. The ledges are submerged in some places and in others rise up dramatically into dramatic outcroppings that became local landmarks. Paradise inspired La Farge to venture out of doors to paint landscapes and still lifes in nature, the latter a Pre-Raphaelite favorite. Plein air painting represented the kind of challenge in art technique that La Farge sought to conquer:

The closed light of the studio is more the same for every one, and for all day, and its problems, however, important, are extremely narrow, compared with those of out of doors. There I wished to apply principles of light and color of which I had learned a little. I wished my studies from nature to indicate something of this, to be free of recipes, as far as possible, and to indicate very carefully, in every part, the exact time of day and circumstance of light (as reported by Royal Cortissoz in John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study [1911], p.112-13).

Never without a sketchbook, La Farge filled his notebook pages with exquisite botanical drawings. In his oil paintings, however, he forsook precision (and the Pre-Raphaelites) in favor of a romantic evocation of sensory experience achieved largely through the use of color. By 1862, the first year that La Farge exhibited work at the National Academy of Design in New York, he had begun to concentrate his plein air work at Nelson's Pond near the family's Paradise cottage. La Farge especially loved a woods comprised of native oak and hickory trees that extended from the banks of the pond north through a glen between second and third ridge. La Farge called the area "the Sacred Grove," after Virgil.  He found hollyhocks growing untended there, their seed pods likely borne by birds or breezes and carried from nearby gardens.

La Farge painted at least three versions of hollyhocks on wood panel, the present Red Hollyhocks and Hollyhocks (Private Collection) both of 1863, and Hollyhocks and Corn (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), 1865, which is believed to have been intended as an element of a decorative scheme for a dining room. Hollyhocks continued to provide inspiration to La Farge throughout his career, frequently appearing in later watercolors as well as stained glass windows. The 1860's hollyhock compositions are painted in encaustic. La Farge was introduced to this medium, a mix of oil and wax, by Henry Styleman Le Strange, an English landowner and amateur painter, whom he met in Belgium in 1856 or 57. Encaustic painting is an ancient technique credited to the Greeks and described by Pliny the Elder in the first century A.D. It aroused new interest in 19^th century Europe from its use on the haunting faces painted on Roman-era funerary portraits excavated in Fayum, Egypt that had made their way into the Louvre and the British Museum early in the century. In addition to appealing to La Farge's abiding interest in the application of scientific principles to art technique, encaustic is  particularly suited to color work, producing "a softer, sheenier surface than oil, with rich colorations and smooth texture" (James L.Yarnall, Nature Vivant: The Still Lifes of John La Farge, 1995,  p. 31). It is, moreover, stable and long lasting. Varying his formulas, La Farge returned to it many times in the decorative work of his later career.

In 1863, La Farge's companion in the scientific exploration of color perception was a new friend, John Chandler Bancroft, son of the diplomat and historian George Bancroft. John Bancroft was staying in his father's house in Newport when he joined La Farge for lengthy and technical discussions about color theory as applied to art. The two also shared a fascination with the Japanese prints that La Farge had doubtless encountered in Paris. La Farge's interest in these would have only been intensified by his marriage into the Perry family. The prints were readily available in Newport through the summer presence of New York China trade merchant, Abiel Abbott Low. Thus La Farge's paintings of 1863 reflect the confluence of a number of strands of enduring interest - color theory, encaustic technique, Japanese art, still life and Pre- Raphaelitism. With Red Hollyhocks, Japonesque in its shape and composition, La Farge explores the visual and emotional effects of the contrasting colors of red and green, using richly textured encaustic to capture the feeling of still life flowers set in their natural surrounding.

William Gerdts, noting the vagaries of La Farge's reputation over the years, observes that while "criticism often runs in cycles, . . there are many collectors, critics, and historians . . . who regard La Farge's flower pictures as his finest works and as the most beautiful floral pieces ever painted in America"( Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life, 1801-1939, p. 139).