La Farge was one of the most interesting figures in late-19th-century American art. He is best known today for his decorative murals and his stained glass (he, not Louis Comfort Tiffany, invented opalescent stained glass). You can see two of La Farge’s splendid windows in the Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, while Boston’s Trinity Church is home to his expansive — and hugely influential — interior decorative scheme.
In one of those historical near-misses that taunts the mind, La Farge departed Tahiti just five days before Paul Gauguin arrived. To Gauguin, a syphilitic narcissist, Tahiti represented an idea, a dream, which had formed in his mind long before he traveled there and to which he stubbornly clung in the face of all the crashing incursions of reality. (Abandoned by his 14-year-old Tahitian concubine, he ended his days in a rat- and cockroach-infested hovel, suffering from eye infections, fainting fits, and ulcerated sores on his legs).
There was no doubt that La Farge, like so many Europeans and Americans at the time — and still today — was under the sway of a related dream of exoticism. He had read some of the same books as Gauguin, and was influenced by the same stories of South Seas adventure.
But he had a very different cast of mind. A writer, painter, decorator, and businessman, he was superbly curious and versatile. “In conversation,’’ wrote his friend and traveling companion, the historian Henry Brooks Adams, “La Farge’s mind was opaline with infinite shades and refractions of light, and with color toned down to the finest gradations.’’
Soon after first meeting La Farge, William James declared, “He knows everything. He has read everything. He has seen everything — paints everything. He’s a marvel!’’ Henry James, meanwhile, looking back on their acquaintance, described La Farge as “quite the most interesting person we knew . . . he opened up to us . . . prospects and possibilities that made the future flush and swarm.’’
