John La Farge’s Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890–1891

John La Farge’s Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890–1891 Elisabeth Hodermarsky With essays by Henry Adams Elizabeth C. Childs John Stuart Gordon and Anna Arabindan-Kesson

YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY, NEW HAVEN IN ASSOCIATION WITH YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

First published in 2010 by the Yale University Art Gallery P.O. Box 208271 New Haven, CT 06520-8271 www.artgallery.yale.edu in association with Yale University Press P.O. Box 209040 New Haven, CT 06520-9040 www.yalebooks.com Published in conjunction with the exhibition John La Farge’s Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890 – 1891, organized by the Yale University Art Gallery.

Yale University Art Gallery New Haven, Conn.

October 19, 2010 – January 2, 2011 Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy Andover, Mass.

January 22 – March 27, 2011

Exhibition and publication made possible by a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art; Mr. and Mrs. Stephen C. Sherrill, b.a. 1975; Denise Bouché Fitch in memory of George Hopper Fitch, b.a. 1932; Mr. and Mrs. Charles P. Sutphin, b.a. 1981; and Mr. and Mrs. James E. Duffy, b.s. 1951, with additional support provided by an endowment created with a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Copyright © 2010 by Yale University.

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Tiffany Sprague, Associate Director of Publications and Editorial Services Designed by Jenny Chan/Jack Design Set in Monotype Dante and Frutiger type by Amy Storm All works are by John La Farge, unless otherwise noted.

Jacket illustration: The end of Cook’s Bay. Island of Moorea.

Society Islands. 1891. Dawn (detail, cat. 46) Frontispiece: Fagaloa Bay. Samoa, 1980. The Taupo, Faase, marshalling the women who bring presents of food (detail, cat. 19) Printed in Singapore by CS Graphics

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hodermarsky, Elisabeth.

John La Farge’s second paradise : voyages in the South Seas, 1890–1891 / Elisabeth Hodermarsky ; with essays by Elizabeth C. Childs [et al.]. p. cm.

“Published in conjunction with the exhibition John La Farge’s Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890–1891, organized by the Yale University Art Gallery.

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn., October 19, 2010–January 2, 2011, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., January 22–March 27, 2011.”

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-300-14135-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-89467-976-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. La Farge, John, 1835–1910 — Exhibitions. 2. La Farge, John, 1835–1910 — Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc. — Exhibitions.

3. La Farge, John, 1835–1910 — Travel — Oceania — Exhibitions.

4. Oceania — In art — Exhibitions. I. Childs, Elizabeth C. II. Yale University. Art Gallery. III. Addison Gallery of American Art. IV. Title.

N6537.L28A4 2010 759.13 — dc22 2010005793 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Director’s Foreword vii Acknowledgments xii A Second Paradise: John La Farge’s Search for the Sublime in the Twilight of the American Landscape Movement Elisabeth Hodermarsky Exoticisms in the South Seas: John La Farge and Henry Adams Encounter the Pacific Elizabeth C. Childs

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John La Farge’s South Seas Sketchbooks: Their Nature and Their Significance 87 Henry Adams Common Ground: John La Farge and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti Elizabeth C. Childs Paradise Remembered: The Late Windows of John La Farge John Stuart Gordon

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145

Map

174

Chronology 177 Anna Arabindan-Kesson Appendix: An Inventory of the South Seas Sketchbooks Henry Adams Exhibition Checklist Index 218 Photo Credits 224

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A Second Paradise: John La Farge’s Search for the Sublime in the Twilight of the American Landscape Movement Elisabeth Hodermarsky

Landscape-painting is unquestionably the art of our epoch, the one branch of the art of painting which this century has excelled in; and, therefore, La Farge was inevitably drawn toward landscape painting, he being a man of his time, if also a man of strong individual peculiarities. . . .

[But though] he has produced a great deal of landscape . . . he is not generally considered as a landscape painter. — Russell Sturgis

AS RUSSELL STURGIS attested in this 1899 tribute, as “a man of his time” John La Farge was naturally drawn to landscape painting, the indisputable genre of his time.1 And yet, as Sturgis continued, despite his prolific production, La Farge was not “generally considered” a landscape painter. Indeed, the artist was best known in his day, and today, for his groundbreaking achievements in stained glass and mural painting (fig. 1) and as a painter of intimate, emotive still lifes (fig. 2).2 Yet plein air painting was arguably the genre that anchored La Farge’s oeuvre — serving as its grounding force and informing many of his most important compositions in each of the media in which he worked. Landscape painting book-ended the artist’s career; along with illustration, it was a predominant early subject, and one that he returned to with gusto later in life — reinvigorated by the intimate experience of tropical color, and of land, sea, and sky, that engaged him throughout his yearlong trip to the South Pacific in 1890 to 1891.

LA FARGE’S EARLY CAREER AND PLEIN AIR LANDSCAPE PAINTING

A Grand Tour of Europe at the age of twenty-one that took John La Farge away from his law studies in New York rekindled the artist’s childhood passion for art.3 While in Paris in 1856 and 1857, the artist studied briefly with the French master Thomas Couture and supplemented his education by copying from masterworks in the Musée du Louvre and in other museums throughout Europe.4 While abroad, he also began actively to paint in the out-of-doors, creating plein air sketches in spots such as Paris, Brussels, Munich, Dresden, and Copenhagen—an exercise that exposed him to a variety of geographies, natural palettes, and light effects. This experience was tremendously important for La Farge, and served to heighten his critical awareness of how separated contemporary nature painting—much of which was being executed in artists’ ateliers —

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Fig. 1 H. H. Richardson, chancel of Trinity Church, Boston, with interior design by John La Farge, 1876 – 77

had become from its actual subject. La Farge noticed how Couture painted his landscapes “as a form of curtain behind a study of the model, which in reality belonged to the studio in which it was a part,” and he “could not understand the necessary compromises with the general truth of nature.”5 He remembered that he was “becoming more and more dissatisfied with the systems of painting which assumed some convenient way of modeling in tones that were arbitrary, and of using colour, after all, merely as a manner of decorating these systems of painted drawing.”6 La Farge was thus able, even at this early date, to distill the essence of what drew him to art — which was an embrace of natural form, and of color, and a denouncement of what he perceived to be artistic artifice. From this juncture, La Farge not only resolved to devote himself to art, but in so doing also to strive to break free from any “systems of painting” and to use color as an integral element of his compositions, rather than as just “decoration” to fill in the lines of a “painted drawing.”7 During the first part of the 1860s, La Farge divided his home between New York and Rhode Island,8 but from 1865 to 1871 — as his family grew — he lived mainly in the Newport area, while maintaining (since 1858) a New York studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building, located at

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51 West 10th Street.9 Throughout these years, landscapes and still life were La Farge’s primary subjects, and an intensifying interest in color theory guided his work.10 As a young artist, husband, and father11 living in an area three miles east of Newport, in the section of Middletown, Rhode Island, familiarly known as “Paradise Valley,” La Farge continued painting en plein air.12 He was deeply fond of the Newport coast and depicted it in dozens of paintings in the 1860s and 1870s.13 “Full of innumerable movements,” the out-ofdoors inspired in him a lifelong passion for capturing the endless palette of nature, and for the challenges in depicting the shifts of season, of weather, of mood.14 It was in Paradise that nature became La Farge’s “muse,” and henceforth nature painting would be the instinctive locus for the artist’s investigations of color theory and light.15 La Farge began to exhibit at the National Academy in 1862. Prior to 1866, the works that La Farge exhibited there were primarily still lifes, portraits, and figure studies. The year 1867 witnessed a marked shift in La Farge’s artistic focus, when nearly half of his entries were suddenly landscapes, and these would remain a significant part of his production until 1871.16 These landscapes were atypical for American art of the time. Unlike the monumental compositions of many of his friends and contemporaries, such as those by Frederic Edwin Church or Albert Bierstadt, La Farge’s landscapes were not overly dramatic in scale or subject, or in their depiction of weather or time of day. Rather, La Farge’s paintings were expressive in a wholly different way—they were quiet, suggestive scenes built up with layer upon layer of color, more akin to the work of the French Barbizon painters than to any style of landscape being painted in America. Indeed, La Farge was very fond of the work of Jean-François Millet, and he acknowledged Millet’s influence on his own work.17 Paradise Valley of 1866 – 68 (fig. 3) is among La Farge’s masterworks from this period.18 It depicts a wide, rock-strewn valley — typical of the topography of coastal New England — with a blanket of verdant scrub brush indigenous to a wet and salty climate. The valley ebbs gently into the distance where it is met by the ocean and a high horizon line. In the center foreground, a single sheep lies on its side, while others graze in the distance, becoming visually subsumed in the landscape. The weather is neither sunny nor foggy nor rainy; the time of day is equally ambiguous.19 Though it appears rather monotone at first glance, Paradise Valley is, in essence, a celebration of color: upon close inspection one can perceive a multitude of reds, whites, browns, blues, purples, and golds in La Farge’s underpainting, which enrich and intensify the crescendo of overpainted greens. Like the best work of the Barbizon painters, Paradise Valley is a

Fig. 2 Roses on a Tray, 1861. Oil on Japanese lacquer panel, 20 x 11 ¹⁵⁄₁₆ in. (51 x 30 cm).

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Katherine M. McKenna Fund, inv. no. 83.51

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Fig. 3 Paradise Valley, 1866 – 68.

Oil on canvas, 32 ½ x 42 in.

(82.5 x 106.7 cm). Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, inv. no. 1996.92

startlingly honest painting, substantial in scale yet unobtrusive in subject, an intense meditation on a pastoral scene.

When compared to his American contemporaries, in his treatment of landscape La Farge has been placed somewhere between the “traditionalists,” such as Frederic Edwin Church, who looked to the compositional models of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and seventeenth-century French artists, and the “modernists,” such as Winslow Homer, who incorporated into his painting pictorial lessons learned from a close study of nature (as did the Barbizon artists), Japanese prints, and photographs.20 As in all the media in which he worked, this made La Farge’s landscapes something of a hybrid: from the traditionalists, La Farge integrated strategies of pictorial recession — essentially, a system of compositional “wedges” — which is evident in the Paradise Valley painting; from the modernists, he learned lessons of cropping, flattening out, and using color as an expressive force.

The first landscape La Farge exhibited publicly was Brenton’s Cove, Newport — Fog Blowing In (1863, private collection), at the National Academy in 1864. It was immediately criticized in a

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rather lengthy and scathing review as “a blind muddle of color on a bit of canvas.” The reviewer continued: “[ La Farge’s] theory . . . is, that color can do everything; . . . that what cannot be expressed by color alone, is indeed so little worth the doing. . . . He is a colorist by nature. . . . He is misled by his strong natural feeling for color; by his love of it. He does not care for form, he despises it, he thinks it may be safely neglected.”21 Written a full ten years before La Farge’s first large-scale decorative commission, and twelve years before his revolutionary innovations in stained glass,22 this review provides a hauntingly prophetic appraisal of the artist’s work, so pointedly (if scathingly) describing La Farge’s “natural feeling” for color, his “love of it.”

Contrast this review with another far more positive appraisal of La Farge’s painting published the same year by the art critic and collector James Jackson Jarves: “[ La Farge] evokes the essences of things, draws out their soul-life, endowing them with an almost superhuman consciousness. . . . His forms are massed and hinted at in an effective manner, instead of being sharply outlined and elaborated as is the art of the realists. . . . [He uses] color not as fact, but as moods of feeling and imagination.”23 Though vastly different in their assessments, both of these early reviews astutely note the essence of La Farge’s art — the artist’s full engagement with color and his treatment of form as subordinate — as Jarves perceives it, not “denying” or “neglecting” form, but instead (as was the artist’s intent) using color to orchestrate and mold form rather than simply to describe it.

By the mid-1870s, when La Farge was beginning to gain a reputation as a fine artist and receiving his first high-profile stained-glass and mural commissions, he largely abandoned landscape painting.24 Between 1878 and 1886, he essentially worked as a full-time muralist and decorator, and the demanding onslaught of commissions left the artist with minimal time for easel painting. Still, La Farge found time to make smaller paintings that could be worked on sporadically and thus accommodate his erratic schedule: these include exquisite easel paintings in oil — mostly still lifes — and watercolor florals. The late 1870s marked the height of the watercolor craze in America and by this time, watercolor had become La Farge’s primary paint medium.25 This was not only because La Farge was “a man of his time,” and thus receptive to contemporary trends, nor was it just because his challenging schedule of commissions necessitated a quicker, more portable medium than oil. In addition to these factors, La Farge’s attraction to the medium was very likely due to it wedding so beautifully with his decorative work: watercolor, which allowed an artist to build up translucent washes or overlays of color, harmonized completely with La Farge’s work in stained glass.26 As a quick, portable medium that also allowed for free experimentation with color effects, and with translucencies and opacities (transparent versus opaque watercolor, or gouache), the medium freed La Farge and informed some of his most vivid windows, featuring distinctive and extraordinary mixings and juxtapositions of color.

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THE 1886 TRIP TO JAPAN

Fig. 4 The Great Statue of Mida Buddha at Kamakura, known as the Daibutsu, from the Priest’s Garden, 1887. Watercolor and gouache, 19 ¼ x 12 ½ in.

(48.9 x 31.8 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of the family of Maria L. Loyt, 1966, inv. no. 66.143

John La Farge’s rather last-minute decision to join his friend Henry Brooks Adams in the summer of 1886 on a three-month trip to Japan ( July 2 – October 2) was prompted not only by his lifelong fascination with Japanese art but also by his desire for a much-needed vacation. For both men, the trip served as something of an escape from their recent pasts: on December 6, 1885, Adams had lost his wife, Marian “Clover” Hooper Adams, to suicide, and just eleven months before that, in January 1885, La Farge was forced to declare bankruptcy and the La Farge Decorative Art Company was dissolved.27 As guests of well-known American collectors of Japanese art Ernest Fenollosa (an 1874 Harvard graduate who was, at the time, an Imperial Commissioner of Fine Arts in Japan) and William Sturgis Bigelow (a relative of Adams by marriage and a practicing Buddhist who had been living in Japan for six years), La Farge and Adams’s travels around Japan were organized and informed. Their Japanese interpreter was Okakura Kakuzo(Fenollosa’s fellow Imperial Arts Commissioner), who was well versed in Chinese classics, the tea ceremony, and Zen Buddhism, and who instructed La Farge in Japanese philosophy and culture during the trip.28 Curiously, despite the fact that their three hosts could provide insights into Japan that La Farge and Adams would not have otherwise garnered in so short a visit, neither one came away with many insightful perceptions about Japanese culture.29 The short and rather structured nature of the trip led La Farge to focus on depictions of people and temples— in general, rather “stock” figures and standard tourist sites (fig. 4), and it was only in subsequent years that the experience of Japan took on a deeper significance for the artist.30 Yet, in many ways the Japan voyage signaled a return to painting as a primary medium for La Farge, and reacquainted him with his roots as a plein air painter.31 Many quite exquisite finished oils and watercolors were executed upon La Farge’s return home, some of which used photographs as source material.32 Among the most interesting of these was an enchanting group painted as late as 1897 that illustrates “fantastic” scenes from Japanese folklore, such as a depiction of an uncanny badger beside a waterfall drumming loudly on his swollen stomach so as to mislead travelers (fig. 5).

Thus, though his experience in Japan reawakened La Farge’s passion for landscape painting, it would not be until four years later, when La Farge once again joined Adams in his travels—

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this time to the islands of the South Pacific — that plein air landscape painting would play the central and consuming role in his work that it had thirty years before. Away from the cares and responsibilities of his decorative-arts business, La Farge once again embraced landscape in a way he had not since the early years of his career. The South Seas islands provided both a varied tapestry of tropical landscape and a comfortable circumstance in which the artist felt relaxed and content and thus free to paint and draw what he chose; it was in the South Seas that La Farge found a second “paradise” to paint. Physically halfway around the earth— and emotionally a world away from the day-to-day pressures of finances and deadlines, of securing and fulfilling commissions — La Farge rediscovered a freedom he had not felt since his early years in Paradise Valley, before the birth of his seven children and the descending pressures of adulthood.33 When La Farge turned his attention from nature morte to nature vivante, spectacular results ensued.

THE LURE OF THE PACIFIC: THE SEARCH FOR THE SUBLIME BEYOND NORTH AMERICA OR EUROPE

In traveling to Japan and the South Pacific, John La Farge followed in the steps of a long line of his American contemporaries — artists who, beginning at midcentury, began to journey beyond the geographic confines of North America or Europe in search of unique vistas, dramatic climates, and unfamiliar natures. This impulse was spurred on by the gradual decline in popularity of the Hudson River School of painting — the first truly “American” style.34 It was also due, in part, to the fact that by the late 1870s, the glories of the American landscape from east to west had been

Fig. 5 The Badger Beating His Drum (The Uncanny Badger), 1897.

Watercolor and gouache, 8 x 8 in. (20.3 x 20.3 cm).

Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York

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Fig. 6 Eugène Delacroix, Sheet of North African Sketches, 1832.

Graphite, 9 ⁵⁄₁₆ x 7 ¹⁄₁₆ in.

(23.6 x 17.9 cm) (irreg.).

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn., Gift of George Dix, B.A. 1934, M.A. 1942, inv. no. 1978.116.1

geographically mapped, scientifically analyzed, and described nearly to excess in prose, poetry, paint, and photograph.35 Europe was the “Old World,” and America the “present,” but in the American spirit of exploration and discovery, and of adventure, many artists— landscape painters in particular — struck out for new or lesser-known places, in search of natural wonders and the exotic. As a tenant in the Tenth Street Studio Building, La Farge was surrounded by artistcontemporaries who sought out such faraway places, among the best known of whom were Frederic Edwin Church, William Bradford, Martin Johnson Heade, and Winslow Homer.36 Moved by the writings of the scientist and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, Frederic Church made his first trip to South America in 1853 and a second in 1857. He subsequently journeyed to Nova Scotia in 1859, to Jamaica in 1865, and to the Near East in 1867 — all of these places inspiring the large, dramatic vistas in oil for which he was, and is today, so renowned.

Another well-known painter of spectacular landscapes, William Bradford, voyaged six times to the Labrador coast and Newfoundland beginning in 1861. Martin Johnson Heade traveled to Brazil in 1863 to 1864, and again in 1866 and 1870 — trips that inspired his exotic tropical bird and flower paintings. A generation younger, Winslow Homer embodied a wholly different artistic style and approach to nature in his bold and impromptu Caribbean watercolors, painting not only the vivid tropical landscapes of Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Cuba throughout the 1880s and 1890s but also numerous genre scenes that seemed to capture local island life and culture.

And yet, in his decision to join Adams on his travels, La Farge was likely looking more to the experience of the French painter whom he most admired, Eugène Delacroix, who had journeyed to North Africa as part of a diplomatic mission in 1832 and documented the people, costumes, and landscapes that he encountered (fig. 6). Delacroix produced dozens of watercolors and oils of Moroccan or Algerian subjects on site, not to mention hundreds of sketches, which served — as would La Farge’s — as raw material for paintings produced later. La Farge had high esteem for Delacroix’s North African work, later commenting rather dramatically, “Only the poet is free, whether he be painter or writer . . . as Fromentin has put it so perfectly, Delacroix’s three months of Morocco contain all that has been said and will be said of the east and south of the

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THE LANDSCAPES PAINTED ON THE 1890 – 91 SOUTH PACIFIC TRIP

From his very first watercolors and sketches made en route to Honolulu from San Francisco aboard the Zealandia, John La Farge strove to record landscapes and genre scenes, which were, in essence, entries in paint to a “visual diary.” In slight sketches and highly worked watercolors

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Mediterranean . . . [ W ]e cannot all be great people like Delacroix, nor great painters like him . . . [ b]ut he tried probably, to be exact and faithful, as any one of us might do.”37 Like Delacroix’s, La Farge’s approach was of a more holistic nature—one as curious about the local peoples and their traditions as about the scenery of Japan and the South Pacific, albeit from the perspective of the privileged Western traveler. Indeed, La Farge’s work would follow a course similar to that of Delacroix; as we shall see, in the South Seas sketches that La Farge produced on site, he attended to detail in a seemingly “exact and faithful,” if selective, way, while those that he produced in subsequent years took on a more exoticized, romantic flair.

Ultimately, however, it was not the work of his artist-predecessors that provided the greatest allure for La Farge, but rather the lavish accounts of explorers such as Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Captain James Cook, and Samuel Wallis, and writers such as Pierre Loti, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Charles Warren Stoddard, whose experiences in the South Pacific — often mixes of fact and fiction— enticed the artist with the notion of a tropical paradise only minimally touched by Western influence.38 As La Farge would later write, “There are many boyish recollections behind the charm of Melville’s ‘Omoo’ and of Stoddard’s Idylls [sic], or even the mixed pleasure of Loti’s ‘Marriage.’ Captain Cook and Bougainville and Wallis first appeared to me with the name of Otaheite or Tahiti; and I remember the far away missionary stories and the pictures of their books — the shores fringed with palm trees, the strange, impossible mountain peaks, the half-classical figures of natives.”39 La Farge was also enticed by the firsthand accounts of his geologist friend Clarence King, who, upon his return from Hilo, Hawaii, in 1872, spoke of scantily clad “old-gold girls” sliding down tropical waterfalls who seemed to personify natural innocence.40 “These literary images were used as illustrations of the happiness of man living in, what people still persist in calling, the state of nature,” La Farge would write. “The ‘pursuit of happiness’ in which these islanders were engaged, and in which they seemed successful, is the catchword of the eighteenth century. . . . Nor am I allowed to forget the assertion of those ‘self-evident truths’ in which the ancestor of my companion, Atamo [Adams], most certainly had a hand.”41 Thus, the South Pacific had a different sort of allure than had Japan. It was the stuff of fiction, the last vestige of paradise on earth. “We wished to go very far. Japan is too near. They have the telegraph there. The Pacific always means two months without news,” La Farge would recount.42

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Fig. 7 / Cat. 3 At Sunrise. Kilauea crater.

Sept. 17th, 1890. Watercolor and gouache, 9 ¼ x 11 ¹⁵⁄₁₆ in.

(23.5 x 30.4 cm). Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, inv. no. 12.529

or oils, La Farge documented his impressions — detailing local rituals or the shifts of light, time of day, or weather — of the South Seas islands. And yet, as Henry Adams articulated in an early letter sent from Honolulu, despite La Farge’s determination to record all that he saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt, even he understood how elusive his efforts would be: “The only trouble is that no painter that ever lived could begin to catch the lights and colors. . . . I have learned enough to understand a little about what can’t be done, but La Farge makes wonderful purple attempts to do it, though he knows how absurd it is.”43 Adams was equally eager to record his impressions. In addition to writing supplies, Adams brought on the trip a Kodak box camera.

Portable Kodaks were first marketed just two years before La Farge and Adams’s trip, in 1888,

by George Eastman. Both Adams and La Farge realized how useful the camera might be — not only as a way of documenting what they saw for friends and family but also as source material for La Farge’s later paintings. “I mean to photograph everything so that you may see it all,” Adams would enthusiastically write in one of his first letters home.44 In the surviving sketchbooks, La Farge’s fascination with the spectrum of minute details is clear. These books served alternately as sketchbooks, notebooks, and diaries — they were the repository for many of La Farge’s perceptions, both visual and intellectual, and are filled with intricate, near-obsessive notes on tropical color, language, and ethnography.45 La Farge also occasionally transcribed in them stories and histories recounted by the Samoan, Tahitian, and Javanese peoples. There are numerous notations on all manner of sensory experiences, including the scale of things, subtleties of color, and the fluid movements of the Siva, a native dance— observances that no sketch or watercolor of his, nor Kodak photograph of Adams, could record.

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WHEN THEY ARRIVED in Honolulu on August 30, 1890, La Farge and Adams were somewhat surprised to find the island so cultivated, with the land much divided into plantations and with convenient options to travel by steamer, horse cart, or even train. Though in their letters and notes the friends lamented this modernization, in truth they seemed pleased to have a bit longer to enjoy the comforts of home. As in Japan, in the scant month they were in Hawaii (departing on September 27), La Farge and Adams concentrated mostly on visiting standard tourist sites, as they relaxed into the tempo and spirit of an extended exotic vacation.

In Hawaii, La Farge concentrated mostly on the Hawaiian landscape, his watercolors providing rough, vague impressions of the islands — distant views of the Kilauea Crater and lava bed (figs. 7, 50 – 51) or of the Pali (fig. 8) on the windward side of Oahu. One of the few oils that

Fig. 8 / Cat. 1 The Great Pali, 1890.

Oil on panel, 12 x 10 ½ in.

(30.5 x 26.7 cm). Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Gift of Mrs. Gustav Radeke, inv. no. 20.397

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La Farge painted during the journey, this latter vista taken from atop the Nuuanu Pali is a hauntingly minimal painting. Here the verdant but barren foreground of lush greens gives way rather abruptly to a view of the red volcanic soil of the receding desert. Adams described La Farge’s attempts to paint these Hawaiian landscapes as something of a Don Quixote – like quest, in its seeming irrationality: “In my belief this is what pleases La Farge. The lights and colors, the shadows and variations of this atmosphere are impossible to paint. You can give an idea of a Scotch mountain, but you cannot begin to render in art a suggestion of Mauna Loa or Mauna Kea or Haleakala. Air and ocean, sun and sky, combine to defy paint. La Farge feels this, and yet is fascinated by the wonderful beauties which he knows he can’t catch, and is always catching at.”46 Fig. 9 / Cat. 21 Siva with Siakumu Making Kava in Tofae’s house, ca. 1893.

Watercolor and gouache over graphite, 18 ⁹⁄₁₆ x 23 ¾ in.

(47.2 x 60.3 cm). Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., Gift of L. Bancel La Farge, inv. no.

1966.3

LA FARGE AND ADAMS arrived in Samoa on October 5, 1890, and found a culture much more in keeping with their expectations of tropical paradise. “Hawaii was pleasant,” Adams would write, “but Samoa is more amusing than fifty Hawaiis. We have found here the true Polynesia. Natives and cocoanuts, coral reefs and bread-fruit, thatched huts and old-gold girls, all in profusion, hardly touched by white improvement. Here are no horse-cars or electric lights, and not many clothes. . . . Society is a complete communism; no one suffers from want. . . . All property is practically common. One would be expected to share everything. They share with

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you, and you are bound in honor to accept all their customs if you take advantage of one.”47 Long since under the influence of missionaries, the Samoans regularly attended church, and yet managed to retain much of their indigenous rituals—Siva dances, songs, traditional feasts—not perceiving as mutually exclusive their two faiths. “I want to note that it was easier to get the Samoans to accept any form of Christian worship because their religion was simpler than that of the other islands,” La Farge observed. “The form seems to have suited the Samoans. It was a service in which every one took part. There was preaching and eloquence and oratory, and to a certain extent the community was invited into the church — not allowed to enter into the church as a favour.”48 In La Farge’s Samoan pictures that were executed on site, landscape often serves as a backdrop to a scene of human activity, as the artist focused on depictions of natives engaged in a whole variety of daily routines, such as kava making (fig. 9) and swimming (fig. 53).49 Indeed, Samoan culture held such fascination for La Farge that he would encourage Adams to prolong their stay, putting off the continuation of their journey to the island group that was the stuff of legends and thus held the most allure, Tahiti.

In Samoa, La Farge painted by day and by night, titling the paintings with atmospheric, romantic, and decidedly Western terms such as “afterglow” or “night effect.” In these works, he evokes mood more through changes in hue than in contrast of light and dark. In comparing daylight scenes, such as Palms in Storm, with rain. Vaiala. Samoa, 1891 (fig. 10), Soldiers bringing presents of food in military order. Iva in Savaii. Samoa, 1890 (fig. 11), Fagaloa Bay. Samoa, 1890. The Taupo, Faase,

Fig. 10 / Cat. 6 Palms in Storm, with rain.

Vaiala. Samoa, 1891.

Watercolor and gouache, 17 ¾ x 11 ¾ in. (45.1 x 29.9 cm).

Saint Louis Art Museum, inv. no. 18.1975 Fig. 11 / Cat. 16 Soldiers bringing presents of food in military order. Iva in Savaii. Samoa, 1890.

Watercolor and gouache, 13 x 13 ¾ in. (33 x 34.9 cm).

The Arkell Museum at Canajoharie, N.Y., Gift of Bartlett Arkell, 1936, inv. no. 317155

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Fig. 12 Twilight at Vaiala, 1890.

Oil on board, 12 ½ x 10 ½ in.

(31.8 x 26.7 cm). Private collection Fig. 13 / Cat. 15 Hut in Moonlight. Iva, Savaii, Samoa. Oct., 1890.Watercolor and gouache, with gum arabic, 12 ¹³⁄₁₆ x 16 ⁹⁄₁₆ in.

(32.5 x 42.1 cm). Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., Gift of L. Bancel La Farge, inv. no.

1966.5

marshalling the women who bring presents of food (fig. 55), or Portrait of Faase, the Taupo, or Official Virgin of Fagaloa Bay, and her Duenna. Samoa, 1891 (fig. 87), to night scenes, such as Twilight at Vaiala (fig. 12), Hut in Moonlight. Iva, Savaii, Samoa. Oct., 1890 (fig. 13), or Siva Dance at Night (fig. 91), one can perceive that La Farge uses dramatic tonal devices such as firelight, but that it is color far more than contrasts of light and dark that distinguishes a daylight or a night scene. The artist revels in aquas, lavenders, and corals by day, and in inky indigos, sapphires, and crimsons by night.

Painted in late October, on a short stopover on the small island of Manono, located between the two main land masses of Savai’i and Upolu, Presentation of gifts of food on Manono Island.

Samoa (fig. 14) documents one of the many ritual greetings that were organized by local tribes in La Farge and Adams’s honor as they toured the islands.50 La Farge painted this image from within a hut — the vine-encircled eaves serving as a visor or frame onto the scene and as a decorative device that brings the landscape to the foreground, recalling compositional lessons learned from La Farge’s study of Japanese prints (fig. 15). In a letter dated November 22 to his son Bancel, which was enclosed with the Manono picture and is now mounted with it, La Farge wrote, “I dared not carry the drawing further, as I have already killed a great deal of the light & transparency which attend every out of door scene here; but I have written to you about this. Nothing is ever pale, there is color everywhere & local color even of the faintest remains. The only way to represent this fullness is by an underpainting carefully finished, and of course this cannot be in

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Fig. 14 / Cat. 13 Presentation of gifts of food on Manono Island. Samoa, with letter to Bancel La Farge at right, 1890.

Watercolor and gouache, 11 ⅜ x 8 ¾ in. (28.9 x 22.2 cm).

Private collection Fig. 15 Ando- Hiroshige, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo: The Kinryuzan Temple, Asakusa, 1856. Polychrome woodblock print, 14 ¼ x 9 ¾ in.

(36.2 x 24.8 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn., Hobart and Edward Small Moore Memorial Collection Gift of Mrs. William H. Moore, inv. no. 1950.447

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Fig. 16 / Cat. 31 Sketch of Maua, Apia. One of our boat crew (detail), 1891.

Oil on canvas, 52 x 38 ⅛ in.

(132.1 x 96.8 cm). Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., Gift of an anonymous donor, inv. no. 1931.8

sketch in watercolor. Even the complications of oil color would have to be studied most carefully to see what means there would be. Nothing modern recalls the light and tone — Delacroix perhaps.” Here La Farge first articulates what will ultimately become the quest of his Pacific paintings — to reach beyond the “modern” palette and style of his day in an attempt to realize in paint the lights and tones of the South Seas.

In the foreground of the Manono picture, seated in front of a number of offerings of food spread upon a large piece of tapa (bark cloth), is a young Samoan man named “Smell Smoke” Namuasua, who is dressed in a blue lavalava (loincloth) with flowers adorning his hair.51 This young man, according to La Farge’s letter, “will in a moment rise, and count aloud the presents, stating who gave them, & c.” Behind him, at a distance, stands the tulafale, or village orator, whom La Farge frames between the two “posts or pillars of the elliptical house” in which he and Adams sit. As the tulafale addresses them “in set speech according to rules on the occasion of the presentation of gifts of food,” two other tulafales and a group of Manono natives look on and listen.

Executed just three months later, on January 27 – 28, 1891, La Farge’s portrait of Maua (fig. 16) would be the most ambitious oil in both scale and finish that La Farge claimed to have painted on site in the South Pacific. The subject— described by the artist in the notation at the bottom of the canvas — is another member of the boat crew that toured La Farge and Adams on their two trips around the Samoa islands of Upolu and Savai’i.52 Whereas in the Manono picture the hibiscus vines wrapped around the foreground pillars create a verdant and enticing screenlike effect, here the hibiscus vines are moved to the background to establish something of a decorative stage set. La Farge pictures Maua in a compressed space beneath this rather dramatic arbor of green vines punctuated by occasional red flowers. In essence a still life with Maua as its subject, the portrait is reminiscent of La Farge’s florals of nearly three decades earlier — in particular, such paintings as his Hollyhocks of about 1863 (fig. 17), in which the red and white blossoms glow against their lush green stalks and the composition gives way to a mottled green background.

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The Samoan paintings are informed by lessons La Farge had learned from his work in stained glass and his thirty-year immersion in color theory and optics, as well as his knowledge of Japanese prints, which boasted a higher-key palette than was typical of Western art of the time. These influences helped free the artist to experiment with a bolder range and intensity of color. One can readily perceive in these compositions how La Farge organizes the space into distinct planes of color, usually complementaries, layered either horizontally or in diagonal receding wedges — juxtapositions that served to heighten the intensity of the image. Groups of figures are invariably distributed in a tableaulike arrangement horizontally across the sheet at the middle ground, as seen in Soldiers bringing presents of food in military order.

Iva in Savaii. Samoa, 1890 (fig. 11) and Girls carrying a canoe. Vaiala in Samoa.

1891. Portraits of Otaota, daughter of the preacher and our next neighbor Siakumu.

The first girl is Faaifi (fig. 18), while single figures or pairs are typically placed centrally, as in Sivá coming from bath, carrying banana leaf (fig. 19), Portrait of the Boy, Sopo (fig. 20), A Samoan Lady (fig. 117), and the portrait of Maua.

For Maua, La Farge chose a palette of the strongest of all complementary color pairings, red/green, juxtaposing the brilliant red of the hibiscus flowers and Maua’s reddish-brown skin against the deep green of his lavalava and the arbor of lush foliage. As a result, the bold and varied shades of these two additive primaries work off of one another to heighten the overall perception of the two colors. Just as vibrant a juxtaposition of complementaries is the greenish-yellow/violet-red seen in watercolors such as Taupo and attendants dancing in open air, Iva in Savaii, Samoa (fig. 124) and Girls carrying a canoe. Vaiala in Samoa. 1891 (fig. 18), in which the yellows and greens of the grass and foliage are strengthened by their direct adjacency to the blue-violets and red-violets of the girls’ clothing and the sea and sky beyond.

In addition to tropical color, La Farge was much intrigued by Samoan culture, particularly its emphasis on the physical, noting that the Samoans were a tremendously sensual people— spending hours on their tattooing, their bath, and their coiffures (lightening their hair with coral lime and adorning it with flowers). He also noted that “the Samoan language [is] extraordinarily rich in words that describe physical sensations.”53 He pointed particularly to the nuances and complexities of the motions of the Siva dances and his realization that, as the principal form of expression, the Siva was, in effect, the principal art of the Samoans. “These people make little;

Fig. 17 Hollyhocks, ca. 1863.

Encaustic on panel, 34 x 15 in.

(86.4 x 38.1 cm). Collection of John and Gail Liebes

Fig. 18 / Cat. 25 Girls carrying a canoe. Vaiala in Samoa.

1891. Portraits of Otaota, daughter of the preacher and our next neighbor Siakumu. The first girl is Faaifi. Watercolor and gouache over graphite, 17 ¹⁵⁄₁₆ x 21 ⅞ in. (45.6 x 55.6 cm).

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Mrs. Arthur Hays Sulzberger Gift, in memory of Mr. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, 1970, inv. no. 1970.120

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the house, the elementary patches upon their bark cloth, the choice of a fine form for tombs, is all the art that is exterior of themselves and of their movements, into which last they have put the feeling for completeness and relation, that makes the love of art.”54 Thus, it is not surprising that the largest number of La Farge’s Samoan pictures are depictions of both sitting and standing Siva dances (figs. 21 – 22, 65, 91, 122, 124) and war dances (fig. 23). He was tireless in his attempt to capture the spirit and feeling, as well as the motions of the varied dances on a static, twodimensional surface. La Farge considered it among his greatest of challenges to portray a sense of the graceful movements of the sitting Siva dances or the more free-form antics of the standing Sivas, and in depictions of both, he employs a more active, expressive style than in his other Samoan subjects.55 Landscape in these images serves to complement the foreground activity: In depictions of sitting Sivas, the fronds of the palm trees bend delicately in the breeze, mirroring the graceful dance, as in Siva Dance at Night (fig. 91).56 And in depictions of standing Sivas, the foliage takes on anthropomorphic properties, seeming literally to join in the raucous dance, with leaves of all shades of greens depicted in a lively and almost pointillist style, as in Another standing dance [Dance of the Very Young Girls], 1890 (fig. 21), Standing Dance. Standing figures. [Standing Dance Representing a Game of Ball] (fig. 22), and Taupo and attendants dancing in open air, Iva in Savaii, Samoa (fig. 124).

WHEN LA FARGE AND ADAMS arrived in Papeete, Tahiti, on February 4, 1891, they were struck by how subdued and somewhat somber the Tahitians were in comparison to the Samoans. The most noticeable manifestation of this subdued nature was the seeming suppression

Fig. 19 / Cat. 22 Sivá coming from bath, carrying banana leaf, ca. 1893. Watercolor and gouache, 13 ½ x 10 ¼ in.

(34.3 x 26 cm). Private collection Fig. 20 / Cat. 23 Portrait of the Boy, Sopo, ca. 1893. Watercolor and gouache, 11 ⅝ x 8 ¾ in.

(29.5 x 22.2 cm).

Private collection

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Fig. 21 / Cat. 10 Another standing dance [Dance of the Very Young Girls], 1890.

Watercolor and gouache, 10 ½ x 13 ¾ in. (26.7 x 34.9 cm).

Mr. and Mrs. Willard G. Clark Fig. 22 / Cat. 11 Standing Dance. Standing figures. [Standing Dance Representing a Game of Ball], 1890. Watercolor and gouache, 8 x 11 ½ in.

(20.3 x 29.2 cm). Private collection, Va.

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of native rituals, particularly of performances of song and dance. Thus, the himene, or choral recitation of hymns and legends, that took place during their visit to the revered Teva – Salmon royal family home in Papara in late February was a noteworthy event, and one that La Farge sketched in detail.57 Just a month after their arrival, Adams would write to his friend John Hay, “Taïtian native society has gone to pieces like everything else. Foreign influence corrupted the dance till it had to be entirely abolished. . . . The only relic of the dance that remains is the singing, and on this the natives concentrate their social energies.”58 Two watercolors taken a day apart from the same vantage point of the verandah of the house of their host, Tati Salmon, in Papara show La Farge exploring a view first as pure landscape and then as a backdrop for the scene of the himene. Painted in the evening, At Papara, Feb. 25th, 1891. Early moonlight and Afterglow. From the verandah of Tati’s house (fig. 24) shows La Farge once again quoting Japanese sources, specifically Japanese prints — not only in its strong horizontal orientation similar to that of a handscroll, but also in its forms and colors. The silhouetted tree at the right of the composition, for instance — with its lush, wide canopy that is so expressive, almost gestural, in its form — takes on qualities similar to those in prints by AndoHiroshige (fig. 25). Painted the next day, Himene at Papara in front of Tati Salmon’s, the chief ’s house. Feb. 26th, 1891 (fig. 26) marks something of a return for La Farge to his celebrations in paint

Fig. 23 / Cat. 17 Military reception and wardance in our honor at Sapapali, Samoa. Sunday, Oct. 25th, 1890; early evening. Watercolor, 5 ¼ x 10 in. (13.3 x 25.4 cm).

Collection of John and Gail Liebes

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Fig. 24 / Cat. 35 At Papara, Feb. 25th, 1891. Early moonlight and Afterglow. From the verandah of Tati’s house.

Watercolor and gouache, 5 ¼ x 12 ⅜ in. (13.3 x 31.4 cm).

Private collection Fig. 25 Ando- Hiroshige, Nagakubo: Sixty-nine Stations of the Kiso Highway, ca. 1835 – 39.

Polychrome woodblock print, 8 ⅞ x 13 ⅝ in.

(22.5 x 34.6 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn., Frances Gaylord Smith Collection, inv. no. 1973.42.14

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of native Samoan rituals. The artist’s inscription beneath the image reads: “A Himene at Papara.

Feby 26 — moonlight. In front of Tati Salmon’s — the chief ’s house. The two children were in front of the lamp which is apparently obligatory. The man at the left standing delivered the opening & closing prayer — Tati’s mother, the old chiefess, called Ariitaimai or Hinarii, repeated legends & stories suggested by the songs — war cries of ancestors — praises of the beauties who unveiled themselves at the bath — all now sung by these quiet sad people in straw hats, gowns & scarfs with an occasional umbrella—as with the woman at the left.”59 Two detailed sketches in one of the surviving books (fig. 27) show how La Farge quickly sketched the himene in graphite— noting the positioning of the figures (“children in front in white/middle, one light”) and colors (“B&W,” for black and white, “R&W,” for red and white, “B&R,” and “deep R”).

Fig. 26 / Cat. 36 Himene at Papara in front of Tati Salmon’s, the chief ’s house.

Feb. 26th, 1891. Watercolor and gouache, 7 ¾ x 12 ⅝ in.

(19.7 x 32.1 cm).

Private collection Fig. 27 Himene in Tahiti, pages 54v and 55r from the sketchbook Samoa & Tahiti (cat. 58), February 26, 1891.

Graphite, each 2 ⅜ x 4 ¹⁄₁₆ in.

(6 x 10.3 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn., Everett V. Meeks, B.A. 1901, Fund, inv. no. 2005.64.55

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This early impression of what the travelers would later realize to be a result of the diminution of Tahitian culture by its colonizers ultimately led La Farge to redirect the focus of his Tahitian paintings to landscape. By now La Farge had fancied himself an amateur ethnographer, almost obsessive in his note-taking on all variety of cultural details, and on body types and measurements. Finding Tahiti overrun by French-imported amenities and influence, he thus turned to landscape, which he perceived to still have something of the uncultivated, “authentic” Tahiti of his imagination, and by far the greatest number of pure tropical landscapes from his South Seas trip were of Tahiti (figs. 24, 28, 33, 61, 83, 86, 114, 132). Most spectacular of these are the magnificent oils and watercolors La Farge made during the month of March, or, later using sketches or postcards, of the Tautira River valley (figs. 35, 37, 43, 86). There was something about the remoteness of the Tautira valley that caught the artist’s attention, its simultaneous senses of containment and freedom, of natural shelter and yet limitless tropical space beyond. In these paintings, one perceives that the artist was in search of an ideal that had been first suggested to him in the travelogues of Cook and Bougainville and in the fictions of Melville and Loti. In the Tautira pictures painted on site, one senses La Farge veering from the truth of his surroundings to suggest a place of impossible natural perfection — as if adherence to the truth of the site would not sufficiently convey its essence.

Just days later, in April of 1891, La Farge would seem to have found the ultimate manifestation of natural utopia when he and Adams journeyed to the island of Moorea— west of Tahiti — for a two-week stay in Tati Salmon’s home at the end of Cook’s Bay, on the north side of the island. It would prove to be a most treasured spot for both La Farge and Adams of the entire trip — both men having described it as imbued with near-mystical properties, as if they had finally reached the tropical paradise of their imaginations, their preconceptions. From the approach into the adjacent Opunohu Bay, Adams commented that it was “the oldest spot of earth I ever saw,” and that “the scene was impressive, the finest we had yet struck. The mountains were two or three thousand feet high, with fine masses and peaks as sharp as needles and knives.” Adams lamented the fact that they had not journeyed to Moorea earlier: “Why could we not have found the place at first? . . . Taiti is lovely; the climate is perfect; we have made a sort of home here; and I never shall meet another spot so suitable to die in. The world actually vanishes here. Papeete was silent and sleepy; Tautira was so remote that existence became a dream; but . . .

[Moorea] is solitude such as neither poetry nor mathematics can express.”60 La Farge’s The end of Cook’s Bay. Island of Moorea. Society Islands. 1891. Dawn (fig. 28) gives physical embodiment to this concept of being in “the oldest spot on earth,” a primordial and supremely peaceful place. Taken from Tati’s verandah at the end of Cook’s Bay and looking south into the interior of the island, this view documents the spectacular geological history of

Fig. 28 / Cat. 46 The end of Cook’s Bay. Island of Moorea. Society Islands.

1891. Dawn. Watercolor and gouache, 14 ¼ x 21 ½ in.

(36.2 x 54.6 cm). New Britain Museum of American Art, Conn., Harriet Russell Stanley Fund, inv. no. 1951.07

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the island: here, at the end of Cook’s Bay and its neighboring Opunohu Bay, one is literally situated in what was once the crater of an ancient, now-extinct volcano called Mou’a Roa. The interior of the island rises in a series of jagged peaks thousands of feet high, seen here beyond a proscenium of impossibly tall palm trees. Two watercolors picturing the 2,900-foot peak of Mou’a Roa, also likely taken from Tati Salmon’s home on the north side of Moorea, further emphasize the height of the island’s interior, which literally gets “lost in the clouds” of La Farge’s paintings: in The Peak of Maua Roa. Noon. Island of Moorea. Society Islands. Uponohu (fig. 114), Mou’a Roa is veiled by clouds; in The peak of Maua Roa. Island of Moorea, Society Islands. “Uatea.” i.e. Rain and sunshine (fig. 61), by fog. Ironically, the stated subject of both watercolors — the peak of the volcano—becomes the most obscured part of the work, as the detailed lush foregrounds at the base of the compositions take center stage.

In both the Tautira and Moorea landscapes, one sees La Farge’s growing comprehension of the true majesty of nature — nature as visceral and multisensory, and of more exotic and epic proportions than anything the artist had yet experienced. If Samoa symbolized for La Farge a return to an Arcadian paradise where natives lived simply and in harmony with the natural world, his experience of Tahiti symbolized a return to an even more ancient time — a prehistoric earth before the coming of man.

ON JUNE 15, 1891, La Farge and Adams arrived in Suva, the capital of the Fiji Islands, located on Viti Levu. They would spend five weeks in Fiji, as guests of the British colonial governor, Sir John Bates Thurston. Both travelers’ first impressions were of a thoroughly civilized culture and stand out in direct contrast to the often-repeated reports they had read before their trip of warring Fijians who practiced cannibalism up until just a few years before. In his letters home, Adams commented repeatedly on how thoroughly British everything seemed, like “a scrap of England dropped into space,” and La Farge noted that “no more war has been noticed than the cricket match and lawn tennis games that we saw yesterday afternoon.”61 Both were also struck by how thoroughly Imperialistic authority seemed to have subdued native culture.

But La Farge was still on his yearlong tropical safari, and the experience of an Anglodominated civilization was not what he had come to “the Fijis” for. Thus it is not surprising that while in Fiji La Farge chose not to paint the Westernized inhabitants of Suva, but rather concentrated his efforts on depictions of less “civilized” natives during a two-week safari to the uncultivated inland of Viti Levu led by Thurston. While such an approach was characteristic of La Farge’s Samoan and Tahitian work, in Fiji the subjects (such as Chiefs in War Dress Seated After a Dance. Islands of Fiji, fig. 84) and titles (Evening Prayer in Devil Country, Fiji, Ngalawana, July 5, 1891, fig. 56) of his paintings seem to focus rather narrowly on the primitive, warlike aspects of

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the culture and would appear to evoke Fiji’s brutal past. This rather closed-minded appraisal of Fijian culture marks a disappointing denouement to the South Seas trip.

Painted on July 3, six days into the trip, is the vibrant watercolor of the inland village of Navundi Wai Wai Vula, on Viti Levu (fig. 29). The fresh, saturated colors of this painting celebrate a medium the artist had now become thoroughly proficient in — and once again show him delighting in juxtapositions of bold, high-key complementary colors (the splash of red of the sulu, the Fijian equivalent of the Samoan lava-lava or the Tahitian pareu, of the figure at the lower left against the lush and varied greens of the terrain, or the yellow of the huts in the middle ground against the washy, vibrant violets of the sky). Notable as well is La Farge’s placement of the male figure at the lower-left corner— a developing motif that the artist would later use repeatedly in paintings and watercolors on South Seas themes, including Entrance to Tautira River, Tahiti (fig. 43) and A Bridle Path in Tahiti (fig. 105).

After Fiji, the remainder of the La Farge–Adams travels were shorter stops — two weeks in Australia, one week in Indonesia, two days in Singapore, and two weeks in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) — and thus toward the end of the trip La Farge’s artistic output was rather sparse. Still, the artist managed to fire off dozens of sketchbook drawings and a few notable images with his

Fig. 29 / Cat. 51 Village of Navundi Wai Wai Vula, in Viti Levu, Fiji, 1891.

Watercolor and gouache, 9 ¼ x 13 ¼ in. (23.5 x 33.7 cm).

Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Mass., Horace P. Wright Collection, inv. no. 49.D35

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Fig. 30 / Cat. 52 Village dancing girls at Garoet in the Preanger Regency, Java, 1891. Watercolor with graphite, 8 ⅜ x 8 ¾ in.

(21.3 x 22.2 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn., Gift of Mrs. John Hay Whitney, inv. no. 1990.12.2

brush — including Village dancing girls at Garoet in the Preanger Regency, Java (fig. 30), Tank at Kandy. Ceylon (fig. 31), and Colossal Statue of Ananda, near the ruined city of Pollanarua, Ceylon, 1891 (fig. 54) — before continuing up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal, and on to Marseille, which he and Adams reached on October 9, 1891.

LANDSCAPES PAINTED UPON LA FARGE’S RETURN TO AMERICA

Henry Adams recalled in his autobiography the sadness John La Farge felt at the close of their South Pacific voyage as the artist “reluctantly crawled away towards New York to resume the grinding routine of studio work at an age when life runs low.”62 But while the fifty-six-year-old La Farge may

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have returned to New York with apprehension, he also returned with a renewed creative vigor, inspired to use the sketches and photographs he had amassed as raw material for future oils and watercolors and to exhibit the work that he had produced during the yearlong journey.63 In fact, La Farge’s South Seas work was already receiving attention before he and Adams returned to America. Throughout their fifteen-month travels, La Farge had periodically sent back to his New York studio (to his son Bancel’s care) paintings he had executed on site.64 In his letters home, Adams frequently referred to this fact and served as an enthusiastic promoter of La Farge’s work, urging friends and acquaintances to view the South Seas paintings at La Farge’s New York studio. In a February 1891 letter to Ward Thoron, Adams noted, “If your grandfather should pass through New York, he might look in at La Farge’s studio, 51 West 10th Street, and look at his sketches, mentioning that I invited him to do so. . . . Of course La Farge’s sketches are not in the least panoramic or topographical or complete as a record of travel. They are rather a set of more or less rapid and arbitrary impressions of moments, often less worth recording than a crowd of moments left unrecorded; but they strike me as being probably the best work ever done in these regions where artists so seldom come; and some of them are true in a sense much higher than ordinary painting ever reaches.”65 Since no inventory exists that itemizes which watercolors La Farge sent to New York during the trip, and since only a handful of works are dated, it is sometimes difficult for historians to distinguish paintings executed in the South Pacific from those done upon the artist’s return.66 However, with a few exceptions, it generally appears that the larger, more finished watercolors were painted later, while the smaller and sketchier sheets were painted on site.67 Notable among the exceptions are watercolors that include narratives to Bancel at their top or bottom margins, such as the sizeable portrait Girls carrying a canoe (fig. 18), now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or those accompanied by full-length letters, such as Presentation of gifts of food on Manono Island (fig. 14).

Larger size and attention to finish are not the only factors that help distinguish earlier from later compositions. There are also a handful of extant watercolors that have direct photographic sources, indicating that they were most likely painted later. Some of these photographs

Fig. 31 / Cat. 53 Tank at Kandy. Ceylon, 1891.

Watercolor and gouache, 11 ½ x 15 ¼ in. (29.2 x 38.7 cm).

Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, inv. no. 12.526

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Fig. 32 Charles Georges Spitz, Diadème, Tahiti, 1887. Albumen print, 4 ¼ x 6 ⁵⁄₈ in. (10.8 x 16.8 cm).

Bishop Museum, State Museum of Natural and Cultural History, Honolulu, Kimberly Album, USS Vandalia

survive in the Henry Adams Papers, now housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. These photographs inspired some of the most handsome of La Farge’s late paintings.

Charles Georges Spitz’s Diadème, Tahiti (fig. 32), for instance, evokes La Farge’s Diadem Mountain at Sunset, Tahiti (fig. 33); Spitz’s Tautira River, Tahiti (fig. 44) can be compared to La Farge’s Entrance to Tautira River, Tahiti (fig. 43); Spitz’s Coast of Tahiti (fig. 106) inspired La Farge’s A Bridle Path in Tahiti (fig. 105); and a photograph by Captain Grenfell (fig. 85) inspired Chiefs in War Dress Seated After a Dance. Islands of Fiji (fig. 84).

Alternatively, La Farge often engaged his imagination and considerable knowledge of Western literature on the South Pacific in his creation of the later watercolors, loosely basing the compositions on pure nostalgia or on historical, fictional, or mythological sources, just as he had with his later Japanese pictures. Characters from contemporary literature (such as the artist’s two versions of Herman Melville’s fictional character Fayaway (figs. 34, 127) or from classical mythology (such as the sylvan female figures in fig. 35) appear often in these works. And La Farge’s writings mirror this romantic, nostalgic focus in his late paintings.68 Recalling their approach to Papeete on the steamer Richmond, La Farge wrote in his Reminiscences of the South Seas, “For the Otaheite [Tahiti] to which we are bound has a meaning, a classical record, a story of adventure, and historical importance, fuller than the Typee of Melville, which we may never see. The name recalls so many associations of ideas, so much romance of reading, so much of the history of thought, that I find it difficult to disentangle the varying strands of the threads.”69 It is also clear that the pigments La Farge used for his postvoyage watercolors and oils became increasingly more intense, distinguished by a more saturated — and often more unnatural — palette of purples, reds, yellows, and greens. What was a lavender in a painting executed on site becomes a fuchsia; sea greens become limes; yellows become chartreuses. In the late work, color itself seems to become exoticized — almost to the point of abstraction — as it takes on an emotive, symbolist quality, undeniable in such luscious compositions as Diadem Mountain at Sunset, Tahiti (fig. 33), The Entrance to Tautira River, Tahiti. Fisherman Spearing a Fish (fig. 37), and A Bridle Path in Tahiti (fig. 105).

The photographs that Adams took with his Kodak, or that La Farge collected in Samoa, Tahiti, and Fiji, would serve their intended purpose as inspiration or out-and-out models for the

Fig. 33 / Cat. 32 Diadem Mountain at Sunset, Tahiti, ca. 1900. Watercolor and gouache, with natural resin varnish, 16 ¾ x 22 ³⁄₁₆ in.

(42.6 x 56.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum of Art, Gift of Frank L. Babbott, inv. no. 19.80

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Fig. 34 / Cat. 30 Fayaway [Girl in Bow of Canoe Spreading Out Loin-Cloth for a Sail, Samoa], ca. 1895 – 96.

Watercolor and gouache over graphite, 15 ³⁄₁₆ x 21 ³⁄₁₆ in.

(38.6 x 53.8 cm). Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum purchase, inv. no. 60.6

watercolors that the artist would produce throughout the 1890s. Yet, even in cases in which a photograph served as the direct source for a watercolor, it would take La Farge’s imagination and mastery of color to bring it to life. As Adams had bitterly assessed just two months into their journey, the black-and-white snapshot left out so much so as to render it a wholly insufficient facsimile of the actual scene. In fact, Adams’s initial enthusiasm for the camera had, not far into the trip, become almost a loathing: “La Farge, as usual, was very busy buying photographs, for which my hatred has now become a real photo-phobia.”70 Adams’s increasing abhorrence of photographs was largely due to his realization of their inability to capture the multisensory experience of the South Pacific — the graceful motions of the Siva, the scents, sounds, and especially the colors of the islands: “We sit in our native house, receiving visits; watching what goes on among the natives of the village; firing off our Kodaks at everything worth taking; . . . By the coming mail I shall send letters to all the ‘family,’ and shall enclose a few photographs. . . . You can borrow or seize them, if you care enough about my story to want a sort of prosaic idea how it looks to me; but remember that the photograph takes all the color, life and charm out of the tropics, and leaves nothing but a conventional hardness that might as well be Scotch or Yankee for all the truth it has.”71

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La Farge, however, was undaunted by what Adams perceived as the limitations of the photograph because he seemed to intuit that in combination with his extensive sketchbook drawings and notes, and by calling upon memory, he could reinfuse the black-and-white source image with the “color, life, and charm” that Adams so missed. In La Farge’s late watercolor A Bridle Path in Tahiti (fig. 105), indisputably derived from Spitz’s photograph Coast of Tahiti (fig. 106), one can readily see how the artist alters the composition so as to make it his own, with the infusion of dynamic, vibrant color.72 The sandy, dry-dirt “coastline” of the Spitz photograph becomes a verdant green “bridle path” in La Farge’s painting; the placid, glassysurfaced sea becomes activated with foam-capped waves; the blank middle and upper right of Spitz’s composition become a picturesque meditation on mountains and sky; and the addition of a young Adonis-like figure on horseback at the lower left situates the watercolor in an ahistorical space. As James Yarnall has noted, this embodiment of the “noble savage” is clearly nostalgic, placing the figure so as to suggest that the viewer were, in La Farge’s words, “present at the end of something — the twilight of a past,” mirroring the artist’s own witnessing of the dissolution of the cultures and largely uncultivated landscapes of the South Pacific, which by the 1890s were becoming ever more threatened by Westernization.73 Aligning himself with Delacroix, La Farge claimed time and again in his postjourney writings, culminating in his Reminiscences, that his impression of the South Pacific was of an Arcadian paradise — as Delacroix had noted of North Africa, the South Pacific islands were for La Farge what he imagined classical Rome and Greece to have been.74 Throughout the trip La Farge referred to both the Samoans and Tahitians as “Greek-like” in build, skin tone, and bearing. And yet, the paintings and drawings that he produced on site do not reflect this claim.

Rather, it is in the work that La Farge produced upon his return to America that one can detect far more self-consciously constructed associations with ancient Greece in what could be described as an archaistic rather than primitivistic way — not only in the portrayal of figures but also in the depiction of Arcadian landscapes.75 Note, for instance, La Farge’s representations of male and female figures in later paintings such as Boy in canoe passing in front of our house, Vaiala, Samoa (“Director’s Foreword” frontispiece), both versions of Fayaway (figs. 34, 127), Ford at the upper end of the Vai-te-piha (Tautira River), Tahiti, 1891 (fig. 35), Entrance to Tautira River, Tahiti (fig. 43), and A Bridle Path in Tahiti (fig. 105), all of which are far more Anglo-European, with lighterskinned and leaner, more sinewy bodies—so different from the darker-skinned, solid, muscular figures that La Farge had painted during the course of the trip (see, for example, figs. 87, 90).

In addition, the landscapes in many of these pictures are markedly more dramatic from those he executed in the South Pacific — in their size as well as their higher-key palettes of intense lapis and emerald green. Such a stretching of the parameters of “normal” color indicates that the

Fig. 35 / Cat. 41 Ford at the upper end of the Vai-te-piha (Tautira River), Tahiti, 1891. Watercolor and gouache, 17 ½ x 20 ⅞ in.

(44.5 x 53 cm). Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio, Gift of Madeleine Crawford-Pezzati, 1991, inv. no. 1991.5

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artist seemed to be once again experimenting and expanding current conventions in an attempt to articulate in paint the lights and tones — albeit now distant memories — of the South Pacific.

Though dated by the artist 1891, the large, romantic watercolor Ford at the upper end of the Vai-te-piha (fig. 35) was likely produced upon La Farge’s return.76 It pictures three olive-skinned female figures in an Arcadian setting: one across the river at the far bank, waist-deep in water, another at the center of the river, her head just above the water, and a third on the near bank of the river, at right, who is on the verge of plunging into the river. One is tempted to read this watercolor as a female version of Thomas Eakins’s Swimming (fig. 36), which features a group of naked young men frolicking unselfconsciously in a pond. Eakins and La Farge shared an admiration for ancient Greece, and certainly both of these paintings evoke the spirit of man and woman living in harmony with nature. Like La Farge’s depictions of Siva dancers, there is also a sense of serial animation to La Farge’s watercolor, a “stop motion” quality—essentially, a depiction of three stages of a single fluid movement. These three figures could in fact be the same woman at three stages of her bath, giving embodiment to the artist’s statement of 1897: “It is a part of the charm of little Tahiti, or Otaheite, whose double island is not more than a hundred miles about, that it has been the type of the oceanic island in story. With its discovery

Fig. 36 Thomas Eakins, Swimming, 1885. Oil on canvas, 27 ⅜ x 36 ⅜ in. (69.5 x 92.4 cm).

Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Purchased by the Friends of Art, Fort Worth Art Association, 1925; acquired by the Amon Carter Museum, 1990, from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth through grants and donations from the Amon G. Carter Foundation, the Sid W. Richardson Foundation, the Anne Burnett and Charles Tandy Foundation, Capital Cities/ABC Foundation, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The R. D. and Joan Dale Hubbard Foundation, and the people of Fort Worth, inv. no. 1990.19.1

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Fig. 37 / Cat. 42 The Entrance to Tautira River, Tahiti. Fisherman Spearing a Fish, ca. 1895, completed 1909.

Oil on canvas, 53 ⁹⁄₁₆ x 60 in.

(136.1 x 152.4 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Adolph Caspar Miller Fund, inv. no. 1966.6.1

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CONCLUSION

The unique colors and unusual light effects of the South Pacific had a deep and lasting impact on John La Farge’s art. Perhaps because the South Pacific sojourn served as something of an extended holiday during which he could paint at will and paint what he chose, it freed his creativity and allowed him to reconvene with his muse. In his South Pacific landscape watercolors in particular, La Farge captured the tangible and intangible: the dramatic fluctuations in tropical weather, the

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begins the interest that awoke Europe by the apparent realization of man in his earliest life — a life that recalled the silver if not the golden age. . . . The state of nature had just then been the staple reference in the polemic literature of the century about to close.”77 The ultimate manifestation of La Farge’s classicizing and exoticizing of the South Pacific landscape is his oil painting The Entrance to Tautira River, Tahiti. Fisherman Spearing a Fish (fig. 37) — the largest canvas on a South Pacific theme that the artist ever painted. Likely begun in about 1895 and worked on for at least a decade, the canvas is something of an anomaly, with its bold, flat areas of brash, streaky color and its inconsistent, alternately thick and thin, application of paint. Certainly, there is nothing similar to this canvas in either La Farge’s oeuvre or in American art of the time.78 One is reminded of James Jackson Jarves’s review of thirty years previous in which he stated that La Farge used color “not as fact, but as moods of feeling and imagination.”79 In essence, Entrance to Tautira River would appear to be a culmination of La Farge’s lifelong exploration of color — of color as its own expressive power — and in scale, hue, and effect is more akin to the works of the French Post-Impressionists.

By the time La Farge and Adams returned from their travels in 1891 Impressionism was a major force in American art. Though La Farge had been familiar with the work of the French Impressionists through his travels to Europe since the 1870s, and though exhibitions of their work had been mounted in the 1880s in Boston and New York, it was not until the early 1890s that a vogue for Impressionism had captured the American imagination and that American artists began to adopt the palette and develop their own form of the Impressionist style. As a lifelong colorist, La Farge was sympathetic to the contributions of the Impressionists and yet, as he had throughout his career, was in his own painting already reaching beyond the popular style.

Entrance to Tautira River is a haunting work in which color, and its application, becomes more emotive, spiritual, and exoticized than ever before. Here at the fin-de-siècle, one can perceive the artist once again looking to French avant-garde movements and presaging the mature work of Henri Matisse and the Fauves, whose insistence on color as a communicative power may indeed owe something to La Farge’s remarkable legacy and influence.

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slow or sudden shifts in light, the changes in mood or time of day in a single scene. This reawakened the artist’s youthful wish to paint landscapes in which he could “apply principles of light and color,” and “to be free from recipes, as far as possible.”80 In a curious way, John La Farge and Henry Adams were ideal traveling companions, especially to such distant climes. Adams, the master of words, and La Farge, the master of so many disparate visual media, provided perfect foils for each other — one’s form of creative expression taking up where the other’s left off. Adams’s words complemented La Farge’s paintings and together formed a more comprehensive “picture” of their travels. “Art begins where language ceases,” La Farge would write in 1893, “and the impressions that we receive, and the manners through which we render them, are in themselves so subtle that no one yet has been able to analyze more than a certain exterior or part of the mechanism of sensation and of representation.”81 With this statement, perhaps La Farge was finally realizing a truth that has traditionally been difficult for Westerners to grasp: that one’s perception of natural beauty is fleeting, intensely personal, and often quite spiritual — and any attempt to depict nature in picture or word will ever be something of an elusory exercise.

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The definitive publication on the breadth and virtuosity of John La Farge’s art is Henry Adams et al., John La Farge, exh. cat.

(Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 1987). The definitive publication on La Farge’s South Pacific production is James L. Yarnall, Recreation and Idleness: The Pacific Travels of John La Farge (New York: Vance Jordan Fine Art, Inc., 1998). This essay owes a particular debt to the latter volume and to previous scholarship on the landscapes of La Farge by Henry Adams, Kathleen A. Foster, Henry A. La Farge, H. Barbara Weinberg, and, especially, James L. Yarnall, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the subject (“The Role of Landscape in the Art of John La Farge,” University of Chicago, 1981) and has contributed numerous articles and essays to the art-historical discourse on La Farge and landscape. Yarnall—the former director of the now-suspended La Farge catalogue raisonné project and Professor of Art History at Salve Regina University, in Newport, Rhode Island—remains the premier authority on the life and work of La Farge.

1 Russell Sturgis, “John La Farge,” Scribner’s

26 ( July 1899): 18.

2 John La Farge has been credited as a father

of the post – Civil War American mural movement. See H. Barbara Weinberg, “John La Farge: Pioneer of the American Mural Movement,” in Adams et al., John La Farge, 160– 93. See also H. Barbara Weinberg, The Decorative Work of John La Farge (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1977). For information on La Farge’s achievements in stained glass, see the essay by John Stuart Gordon in this catalogue.

3 Only a small number of childhood sketchbooks survive, including two in the Yale University Art Gallery collection, dating to

1849 – 50 and 1852 (inv. nos. 1984.71.7 and 1986.33.26 – .57). There have been several biographies and biographical sketches of La Farge that discuss his early years, most notably Royal Cortissoz, John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911), 41 – 99. For a quick synopsis of La Farge’s life, however, the most useful source is: James L. Yarnall with Mary A. La Farge, “Chronology,” in Adams et al., John La Farge, 239 – 45.

4 Eight surviving notebooks from La Farge’s Grand Tour that include such sketches after European masterworks are in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery (inv. nos. 1984.71.8 – .13 and 2005.64.1 – .2).

5 Cecilia Waern, John La Farge: Artist and Writer (London: Seeley and Co., Limited, 1896), 12 – 13. La Farge’s early realizations that championed a return to nature were clearly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti), organized in 1848. These artists based their approach on the early theories of John Ruskin (1819 – 1900), who had published Modern Painters (London: Smith, Elder, and Co.) in 1843. See also Cortissoz, John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study, 68 – 69, 98.

6 John La Farge, quoted in Waern, John La Farge: Artist and Writer, 11 – 12.

7 In the fall of 1857, La Farge was called home by the news of his father’s illness.

Though passionate about art, he resumed his law studies at the behest of his ailing father, who died on June 26, 1858. His father’s death left La Farge with a sizeable inheritance, and a resolve to leave the law and pursue a career as an artist. See Adams et al., John La Farge, 19.

8 In 1859 La Farge had relocated from New York to Newport, Rhode Island, in order to study painting with William Morris Hunt.

Among his fellow students were William and Henry James and Thomas Sargeant Perry, the brother of Margaret Mason Perry, who La Farge would marry the following year (see n.11).

9 Designed by Beaux-Arts architect Richard

Morris Hunt, the Tenth Street Studio Building, which opened in January 1858, provided twenty-three studios around a central exhibition space. Tenants included influential writers, architects, and artists, many of whom were among the best known of their day, including Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Edwin Church.

A close friend of Richard Hunt and his brother William, La Farge was among the first tenants in the building, and he maintained his studio until his death in 1910.

10 La Farge later recalled that it was during his 1856 – 57 trip to Europe that he had first read the writings on color theory of “the illustrious Chevreul.” Michel-Eugène Chevreul (1786 –1889) was author of De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (Paris: Chez Pitois-Levrault et Ce., 1839), a volume that La Farge absorbed as he traveled to the great cathedrals and churches of Europe. This author was a French industrial chemist and color theorist whose published theories built upon Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1810 treatise, Theory of Colors, and on earlier texts on color theory dating back to Leonardo da Vinci. Chevreul devised the color-circle and talked specifically about complementary colors (red/green, orange/blue, greenishyellow/violet, indigo/orange-yellow), and how these colors, when used side by side, increase the intensity of their complements.

11 On October 15, 1860, La Farge married Margaret Mason Perry (1839– 1925). Between 1862 and 1875, Margaret would give birth to twelve children, seven of whom would live past childhood: Christopher Grant (1862 – 1938); Emily Maria Louisa (1863 – 1919); John Louis Bancel (1865 – 1938); Margaret Angela (1867 – 1956); Oliver Hazard Perry (1869 – 1936); Frances Mary Aimée (1874 – 1951); and John (1880 – 1962).

12 Paradise is a small section on the southeastern tip of Middletown, Rhode Island.

For more information on Middletown, see James L. Yarnall, John La Farge in Paradise: The Painter and His Muse (Newport, R.I.: William Vareika Fine Arts, 1995), 2.

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Notes

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See the nearly complete but unpublished catalogue raisonné of John La Farge’s oeuvre, Henry A. La Farge and James L. Yarnall, John La Farge Papers Relating to His Catalogue Raisonné, 1965 – 1990, Uncat MSS 581, now housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

14 John La Farge, Considerations on Painting: Lectures Given in the Year 1893 at the Metropolitan Museum of New York (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1895), 262.

15 The definitive study of La Farge’s life and work in Paradise is Yarnall’s John La Farge in Paradise. As Yarnall discusses, many of La Farge’s early commissions were for illustrations to volumes of poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Robert Barrett Browning.

These illustrations were often quite compositionally inventive, and almost always included interesting placements of figures within the landscape (the landscapes nearly always referencing the environs of Newport).

16 Kathleen A. Foster, “The Still-Life Painting of John La Farge,” American Art Journal 11, no. 3 ( July 1979): 21 – 22.

17 See John La Farge, The Higher Life in Art: A Series of Lectures on the Barbizon School of France Inaugurating the Scammon Course at the Art Institute of Chicago (New York: McClure Company, 1908), 67 – 91.

18 When Paradise Valley was first exhibited, at the National Academy of Design in 1876, it was titled New England Pasture Land. It was purchased that year by Alice Sturgis Hooper for $3,000—La Farge’s asking price. Paradise Valley has often been cited as one of the first American Impressionist landscapes. La Farge himself, however, denied any stylistic comparison between his work and that of the Impressionists.

See Cortissoz, John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study, 131.

19 For La Farge’s comments on this work, see ibid., 129 – 30. Despite La Farge’s claim that he carefully chose a specific time of day and consistent weather for this 13

painting, the viewer would be hard-pressed to identify this as morning or afternoon, or as spring, summer, or autumn.

20 For an interesting discussion of this shift in American painting of the post – Civil War era, see Gail S. Davidson et al., Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2006), 79. La Farge claimed that he first became aware of Japanese prints while in Paris in 1856, and it is believed that he began collecting Japanese prints as early as 1859. He was likely exposed to other Japanese artifacts through his marriage in 1860 to Margaret Mason Perry, granddaughter of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry and grandniece of Commodore Matthew Galbraith Perry, who “opened” Japan to the West in 1852 – 54. See Henry Adams, “John La Farge’s Discovery of Japanese Art: A New Perspective on the Origins of Japonisme,” Art Bulletin 67, no. 3 (September 1985): 452– 53. On John La Farge’s use of photography in his painting, see James L. Yarnall, “John La Farge’s Portrait of the Painter and the Use of Photography in His Work,” American Art Journal 18, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 5 – 20; and Yarnall, “New Insights on John La Farge and Photography,” American Art Journal 19, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 52 – 79.

21 New York Daily Tribune, April 23, 1864, 3 – 4; emphasis added by author. I am indebted to Kathleen Foster for bringing this review to my attention; see Foster, “Still Life Painting of John La Farge,” 22. Foster notes that the review was probably written by Clarence Cook, a champion of John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, and one of the harshest art critics of the time.

22 See the essay by John Stuart Gordon in this catalogue.

23 James Jackson Jarves, The Art Idea: Part Second of Confessions of an Inquirer (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1864), 225 – 26; emphasis added by author.

24 In 1874 La Farge received his first stainedglass commission, from Ware and Van Brunt, for windows for Memorial Hall at

Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Only half completed, and considered a failure by La Farge, the window was never installed. In 1876 the artist received the commission that would cement his reputation as an important decorative artist: to design and oversee the interior decoration and murals for H. H. Richardson’s Romanesque-style Trinity Church, in Boston, assisted by the artists Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Francis Davis Millet.

25 La Farge was elected to the American Society of Painters in Watercolor (later the American Water Color Society) in 1868. The craze for watercolor reached great heights in the late 1870s, as numerous similar watercolor societies cropped up across the country. In 1876 La Farge first exhibited with the Society at the National Academy of Design, in New York, and in 1882 he was nominated president of the club.

26 This has been noted by several scholars, including James L. Yarnall, Henry Adams, and Kathleen A. Foster.

See in particular Adams et al., John La Farge, 44 – 48, 150 – 51.

27 Before Marian “Clover” Hooper Adams’s death, the couple were avid travelers, and had even made plans to travel together around the world, including stops in Japan and the South Pacific; see Yarnall, Recreation and Idleness, 9. For a longer discussion of the events surrounding Clover’s suicide, see Edward Chalfant, Better in Darkness: A Biography of Henry Adams, His Second Life, 1862 – 1891 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1994), 481 – 504, 511.

28 Okakura Kakuzo- would later dedicate his publication The Book of Tea (New York: Fox, Duffield, and Company, 1906) to “John La Farge, Sensei.” This was the first book on the tea ceremony to be published in English.

29 This is especially surprising in the case of Adams, who was a seasoned traveler. During his lifetime, he visited not only Japan and the islands of the South Pacific but also Cuba, the Caribbean, Mexico, Egypt, Greece,

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these are simple, thoroughly interpreted, and show a sincere sympathy for all that is most artistic and poetic in nature. No affectation is resorted to. They seem to have [hit] . . . the point where realism and sentiment unite; there is enough of both, but not too much of either.” See “Art at the Paris Exposition,” Scribner’s 17 (December 1878): 276.

35 Stresses of post – Civil War reconstruction — of industrialization, urbanization, and mass immigration—also led artists to travel to the Western frontier and beyond the geographical limits of North America in their search for fresh and dramatic subject matter.

Randall C. Griffin describes this phenomenon in Homer, Eakins, and Anshutz: The Search for American Identity in the Gilded Age (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 30 – 31.

36 Frederic Edwin Church (1826 – 1900) maintained a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building from 1858 to 1889; William Bradford (1823 – 1892) was a tenant there from 1861 through 1862, and again from 1865 to 1877; Martin Johnson Heade (1819 – 1904) was a tenant from 1859 to 1861, and again from 1866 to 1879; and Winslow Homer (1836 – 1910) was a tenant from 1871 through 1880.

See Annette Blaugrund, The Tenth Street Studio Building: Artist-Entrepreneurs from the Hudson River School to the American Impressionists, exh. cat. (Southampton, N.Y.: Parrish Art Museum, 1997).

37 John La Farge, Reminiscences of the South Seas (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1912), 224. It should be noted that before its posthumous publication, La Farge’s manuscript for this book was revised— how invasively we do not know—by Grace Edith Barnes, La Farge’s studio manager and executrix of his estate. See Yarnall, Recreation and Idleness, 167 – 70.

38 See Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, during a Four Months’ Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846); Melville, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South

Seas (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1847); Mark Twain, Roughing It (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1872); Charles Warren Stoddard, South-Sea Idyls (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1873; repr. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919); Pierre Loti [Julien Viaud], The Marriage of Loti, trans. Wright and Eleanor Frierson (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1976), originally published in 1880; and Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas: Being an Account of Experiences and Observations in the Marquesas, Paumotus, and Gilbert Islands in the Course of Two Cruises, on the Yacht “Casco” (1888) and the Schooner “Equator” (1889) (London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1924).

39 La Farge, Reminiscences, 288. In the estate sale of La Farge’s library at the MerwinClayton Sales Company, New York, on February 20 – 23, 1911, among the books listed as remaining in the artist’s library at his death were several travel books and dictionaries on cultures and languages of the Pacific Islands, including volumes by Captain James Cook, C. F. Gordon Cumming, and Charles Warren Stoddard, as well as Loti’s Le mariage de Loti, Melville’s Typee, and several books by Robert Louis Stevenson. For the complete listing of La Farge’s estate sale, see La Farge Family Papers, 1850 – 1990, microfilm, MS 24, reel 5, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.

40 For more on the “old-gold girls,” see the essay “Exoticisms in the South Seas: John La Farge and Henry Adams Encounter the Pacific” by Elizabeth C. Childs in this catalogue.

41 La Farge, Reminiscences, 297 – 98. Henry Adams was the great-grandson of the second president of the United States, John Adams, and the grandson of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States.

42 John La Farge, quoted in Paul Bourget, Outre-mer: Impressions of America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895), 367.

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Turkey, Russia, Norway, Sweden, and virtually every other country in Europe; see Yarnall, Recreation and Idleness, 9.

30 See Henry Adams, “The Mind of John La Farge,” in Adams et al., John La Farge, 48. See also James L. Yarnall, “Nature and Art,” in ibid., 102 – 7; and Yarnall, Recreation and Idleness, 13 – 58. What both La Farge and Adams did come away with, however, was an interest in Buddhism, and many of the watercolors that La Farge painted upon his return include images of Buddhas and shrines, and spiritual motifs such as images of waterfalls. See John La Farge, An Artist’s Letters from Japan (New York: Century Co., 1897).

31 See Yarnall, “Nature and Art,” in Adams et al., John La Farge, 102.

32 La Farge’s use of photographs as reference material was by 1886 a well-established practice in his work; see Yarnall, Recreation and Idleness, 16. See also Yarnall, “John La Farge’s Portrait of the Painter,” 4 – 20; and Yarnall, “New Insights,” 52 – 79.

33 Henry Adams underwrote all expenses of the South Seas voyage, as he had on their Japan trip. Despite the professional successes that La Farge enjoyed between the 1886 trip to Japan and the 1890 trip to the South Pacific, which included a resuscitation of his mural and stained-glass career, La Farge’s financial situation was still unbalanced; see Yarnall, Recreation and Idleness, 11.

34 The decline in popularity of the Hudson River School of painting was prompted by a marked influx of European art at the close of the Civil War. Most American critics embraced French Barbizon painting as early as the late 1870s because its landscapes offered an alternative to the detailed Ruskinian scenes of the Hudson River School. A glowing American review of Barbizon art at the Paris Exposition of 1878 reads, “One is here most struck by the landscapes, which are the chief glory of the French school. The subjects of the best of

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Henry Adams, letter to Mabel Hooper, September 10, 1890, in The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson et al.

(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982 – 88), 3:274.

44 Henry Adams, serial letter to Elizabeth Cameron, August 26 –September 8, 1890, in Levenson et al., Letters of Henry Adams, 3:271, 273n.4. As they had in Japan, both La Farge and Adams also avidly collected photographs taken by photographers based in Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, and Fiji, realizing how useful they, too, might be as source material for La Farge’s later paintings.

45 Preparatory sketches from these notebooks for ideas later realized in watercolors and oils within this exhibition include cat. 58, p. 42r, study for fig. 20; cat. 58, pp. 46v, 47r, 50r, and 51r, sketches for fig. 88; cat. 58, pp. 54v and 55r, sketches for fig. 26; cat. 59, p. 30v, study for fig. 89; cat. 60, pp. 47r, 48r, 49v, and 50r, sketches for fig. 83; and cat. 65, p. 20r, study for fig. 88.

46 Henry Adams, letter to Elizabeth Cameron, September 27, 1890, in Levenson et al., Letters of Henry Adams, 3:286.

47 Henry Adams, letter to Rebecca Gilman Rae, November 8, 1890, in Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters, ed. Harold Dean Cater (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1947), 210 – 11.

48 La Farge, Reminiscences, 123, 132.

49 La Farge’s concentration on depicting figures engaged in daily activities while in Samoa (and his preference for landscape in Hawaii and Tahiti) has been noted by previous scholars, including Henry A. La Farge and James L. Yarnall.

50 It was customary for Samoans to honor visitors in this way. However, La Farge and his wealthy friend Adams were not ordinary visitors and thus likely received more attention—feasts and Sivas and gifts — than were typically bestowed on Westerners.

51 The name of the sitter has been only recently discovered by this author as a result of studying La Farge’s South Pacific sketchbooks. On page 76v of the sketchbook 43

Samoa (cat. 56), La Farge notes, “Namúasua / Smell Smoke / boy who posed for Manono picture.” And on page 237 of his Reminiscences, La Farge later explains about the rather haphazard nature of Samoan names: “You will notice . . . how often names for people are arbitrary and accidental. Otaota, the beautiful daughter of the missionary person, is called Rubbish. Fagalo, who slipped [ in ] the waterfall, is Forgetful, and so on. We have Smell Smoke Namuasua (or Cook-house, as Samasoni translated it) in our boat’s crew. In the early traditions, such and such an early divine heroine names her children by things that occur at their birth. One, I remember of ‘Carpenter’s Tools Rattling in a Basket.’ ” 52 The inscription at the bottom of the canvas reads, “This is a sketch of Maua, one of Seumanu’s men and / one of our crew in the two trips around the islands of Savaii & Upolu / Maua is not tattooed (so that his legs are not bluish, looking as if silk / (blueblack) drawers were worn). He ought to be tattooed, but I think is / afraid of the pain. He will make believe that it is uncivilized or perhaps / will trot out the Church, for he is a leader in prayer — in any small deviltry / as well. — He is not handsome as you see, but he is intelligent — I thought / I could get him to sit on that account, as it is difficult to get natives to pose well, but he / could hardly keep quiet a minute. I had only a few hours to paint this in, & was at work / when the call was made for our boat to leave for Tahiti. Hence, unfinished.”

53 La Farge, Reminiscences, 106.

54 John La Farge, “Passages from a Diary in the Pacific: A First Day in the South Seas,” Scribner’s 29 ( June 1901): 684.

55 Adams described the distinction in this way: “Almost every evening, and often after big shows, in the daytime, we were entertained with dances, or Siva. . . . There are many kinds of Siva, but the great distinction is between the sitting and standing dance. In the sitting Siva six or eight girls or men sit on the ground and go through all sorts of

movements to an accompaniment of unearthly singing. In the standing Siva, several men and women imitate all sorts of acts, and they like to pretend to play ball; to fight with spears and swords; to be birds, like owls, or beasts, like cats or rats; and to climb cocoa-nut [sic] trees, and get the nuts; or to splash water over each other in bathing, or to hammer on anvils, or to do anything that they think of in daily life. Sometimes they are wonderfully graceful, and the music is almost fine; sometimes they are grotesque and repulsive; but when a set of fine young men and women dance these dances in the evening by the red light of a palm-leave flame, in one of the open native houses, it is a scene to remember.”

Henry Adams, letter to Mabel Hooper, November 2, 1890, in Levenson et al., Letters of Henry Adams, 3:320 –21.

56 The inscription at the top of this watercolor reads, in part, “My dear B: — You will see at once that the sketch is either carried too far, or not far enough. . . . This is an attempt to represent one of the motions of the Siva, when the dancers stretch out their hands to right and left and draw them slightly along the mats. The cocoanut fire, supposed to light the hut, is extremely brilliant, and at a distance at night I see Rembrandt pictures, where the central light reflected from some figure, from some child or woman of deep brown color, becomes like silver, then passes into shade through every variety of tone.” This letter was either composed, or later copied, by La Farge into the sketchbook Samoa (cat. 57), p. 63v.

57 Himene is a Tahitian term derived from the English word hymn. “The himene — hymnsinging — has taken the place of the Siva.

To us, the himene seems a pretty colorless affair, for the women and children sit still in a circle, or on benches, and rattle off song after song, without more variation than if they were in church. . . . As it is, the himene like everything else in Taïti, is a wreck, not quite so awful as in Hawaii, but painful and melancholy enough.” Henry Adams,

45

Adams: An Autobiography (Washington, D.C.: privately printed, 1907; repr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918), 316.

Citations are to the 1918 edition.

63 Between his return and 1894, many of La Farge’s best South Seas paintings had been either sold to collectors or given away as gifts. La Farge was thus forced to borrow back or to make copies of many of the South Seas works for exhibitions at Doll and Richards in Boston in 1893 and 1895 (titled Exhibition and Sale at the Gallery of Messrs. Doll & Richards and Exhibition and Private Sale of Paintings in Water Color and Oil from the South Sea Islands and Japan by Mr. John La Farge at the Gallery of Messrs. Doll & Richards, respectively) and exhibitions in 1895 at Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York and Paris (titled Paintings, Studies, Sketches and Drawings, Mostly Records of Travel, 1886 and 1890–91, and Souvenirs et notes d’un voyage dans les mers du Sud et au Japon, 1886 et 1890–91, respectively), as well as in later, smaller exhibitions that traveled to Cleveland in 1896–97, and to Chicago and Saint Louis in 1897.

This proved, of course, to also be an advantageous marketing scheme, enabling La Farge to capitalize on a certain composition or motif by, in essence, selling it twice (see figs. 14, 23, 34, 127 – 29, for motifs that La Farge reproduced for exhibition and publication purposes); see Yarnall, Recreation and Idleness, 143–47. Among La Farge’s patrons who were most generous in their loans to the early exhibitions of La Farge’s South Seas work were Henry Lee Higginson, a wealthy banker and founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who had collected in excess of thirty-five South Seas pictures; Edward William Hooper, Adams’s brother-in-law; and William Sturgis Bigelow, whose collection now resides at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The Paris exhibition was a flop—barely noticed by reviewers of the Salon. In America, however, La Farge’s South Seas work was a tremendous success both

before and after the Paris viewing. In the 1890s, La Farge made the equivalent of at least $1 million from the sale of his travel pictures. Nevertheless, at his death in 1910, he was in debt for between $30,000 and $34,000. See Margaret La Farge, letter to Bancel La Farge, July 18, 1911, in La Farge Family Papers, reel 3.

64 Indeed, in June 1891, a selection of seven of La Farge’s Japanese and South Seas watercolors were exhibited in a group show of American art at Galerie DurandRuel in Paris, having been forwarded from the artist’s New York studio by his son Bancel. See Yarnall, Recreation and Idleness, 148; and Yarnall with La Farge, “Chronology,” in Adams et al., John La Farge, 244.

65 Henry Adams, letter to Ward Thoron, February 8, 1891, in Levenson et al., Letters of Henry Adams, 3:414.

66 See Yarnall, Recreation and Idleness, 147. It should be noted, however, that in the sketchbooks, La Farge occasionally jotted down lists of watercolors he was planning to send home. See, for example, cat. 57, page 71v, or cat. 58, page 3r. The descriptive titles La Farge gives the watercolors in these books are cryptic and could refer to more than one composition — thus, it is nearly impossible to match them with any true assurance.

67 Yarnall, Recreation and Idleness, 101 – 2; and James L. Yarnall, e-mail to the author, January 2, 2008.

68 Fayaway is a character in Melville’s romantic novel Typee, about life in the Marquesas Islands. In the novel, a local girl, Fayaway — the embodiment of the “noble savage,” of natural beauty and innocence — removes her garment of tapa cloth, and “[w]ith a wild exclamation of delight . . . and spreading it out like a sail, stood erect with upraised arms in the head of the canoe. We American sailors pride ourselves upon our straight clean spars, but a prettier little mast than Fayaway made was never shipped aboard of any craft.” Melville, Typee, 155.

a second paradise

letter to John Hay, March 2, 1891, in Levenson et al., Letters of Henry Adams, 3:432. For an overview of modern Tahitian history and the lineage of the Teva–Salmon royal family, see the essay “Common Ground: John La Farge and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti” by Elizabeth C. Childs in this catalogue.

58 Ibid., 3:431 – 32. La Farge and Adams were well-educated men of their era. Though often racist-sounding in their accounts, both were sympathetic to the effects of Western military, political, and missionary intrusions into the South Pacific cultures. Even prior to their trip, La Farge and Adams were not completely unsuspecting of the ways in which South Pacific culture had been compromised throughout the course of the nineteenth century, as travel books and articles in journals often discussed the damaging effects of colonization. See Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985). See also the essay “Exoticisms in the South Seas: John La Farge and Henry Adams Encounter the Pacific” by Elizabeth C. Childs in this catalogue.

59 During the end of their stay in Tahiti, Adams took down the history of Tahiti, as told to him by the Teva matriarch Arii Taimai Salmon and her daughter, Queen Joanna Marau Ta’aroa Tepau, which he would later publish in Tahiti: Memoirs of Arii Taimai e Marama of Eimeo Teriirere of Tooarai, Terriinui of Tahiti, Tauraatua I Amo (Washington, D.C.: privately printed, 1901). See the essay “Exoticisms in the South Seas: John La Farge and Henry Adams Encounter the Pacific” by Elizabeth C. Childs in this catalogue.

60 Henry Adams, serial letter to Elizabeth Cameron, April 13 – 25, 1891, in Levenson et al., Letters of Henry Adams, 3:458 – 59.

61 Henry Adams, serial letter to Elizabeth Cameron, June 4 – 23, 1891, in Levenson et al., Letters of Henry Adams, 3:488; and La Farge, Reminiscences, 399.

62 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry

elisabeth hodermarsky

46

La Farge, Reminiscences, 288 – 89; emphasis added by author.

70 Henry Adams, serial letter to Elizabeth Cameron, September 8 –October 8, 1891, in Levenson et al., Letters of Henry Adams, 3:547.

71 Henry Adams, serial letter to Elizabeth Cameron, October 2 – 23, 1890, in ibid., 3:298.

72 Notably, in a contemporary review of the first documented exhibition of A Bridle Path at the Eleventh Annual Exhibition of the New York Water Color Club held at the American Fine Arts Society, November 10 – December 2, 1900, the reviewer wrote that “the coloring [is] on a scale of brilliancy that approximates crudity.” “New York Water Color Club Exhibition—Notes,” New York Commercial Advertiser, November 10, 1900.

73 John La Farge, “Passages from a Diary in the Pacific: Tahiti,” Scribner’s 30 ( July 1901): 81.

74 In addition to Reminiscences of the South Seas, La Farge’s published writings on aspects of the South Pacific trip include John La Farge, “Tahitian Literature: The Teva Poets—Notes on a Poetic Family in Tahiti,” in Library of the World’s Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, ed. Charles Dudley Warner, vol. 36 (New York: International Society, 1897), 14389 – 98; “Passages from a Diary in the Pacific: Hawaii,” Scribner’s 29 (May 1901): 537 – 46; “Passages from a Diary in the Pacific: A First Day in the South Seas,” 670–84; “Passages from a Diary in the Pacific: Tahiti,” 69 – 83; and “A Fiji Festival: The Story of the War of the Fish-Hook,” Century 67, no. 4 (February 1904): 518 – 26.

75 Archaistic and primitivistic are apt terms used by James Yarnall in his doctoral dissertation; see “Role of Landscape,” 370. Though La Farge had likened the South Pacific climate to the Mediterranean and the natives to such idealized, sylvan figures in his sketchbooks and letters, it was not until his return home that he created such direct quotations of the ancient past: “So those lovers of form, the Greeks, must have looked, anointed and crowned with garlands, and the so-called dance that we saw 69

might not have been misplaced far back in some classical antiquity.” See La Farge, Reminiscences, 84–85. In effect, in these watercolors La Farge seems literally to be conflating the “paradise” of Arcadia with the “paradise” of the South Pacific.

76 In its size, degree of finish, and romanticized subject it is more akin to the later watercolors, and thus it is the opinion of this author that it was painted after La Farge’s return to New York on November 19, 1891.

77 John La Farge, “Tahitian Literature,” 14389.

78 See Henry Adams, “Mind of John La Farge,” in Adams et al., John La Farge, 61. This canvas remained in La Farge’s studio at his death.

79 Jarves, Art Idea, 226.

80 Cortissoz, John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study, 112 – 13.

81 La Farge, Considerations on Painting, 119.