藝術家John LA FARGE (1835-1910) 生平簡歷

出生地： NYC

死亡地点： Providence, RI

地址： NYC

职业： Still-life, landscape, and mural painter, stained glass designer, writer, critic, teacher

教育： with maternal grandfather, a miniaturist; Mount St. Mary's Col., MD (graduated); studied law briefly; Europe in 1856, with Couture, at the Louvre, Holland, Belgium, England; for a short time with William Morris Hunt, Newport, RI, c.1858

展出： Brooklyn AA, 1864, 1868-69, 1876, 1879; Paris Salon, 1874; Boston AC, 1873-74, 1882-1909; Centennial Expo., Phila., 1876 (med.); PAFA Ann., 1888, 1893, 1898-1907; French Expo., 1889 (Legion of Honor); AIC; SNBA, 1895; Pan.-Am. Expo, Buffalo, 1901 (gold); St. Louis, 1904 (med.); Arch. Lg., 1909 (med.); NAD (1862-1908); AWCS; Corcoran Gal., 1908; BMFA, 1911 (major retrospective); Vareika Fine Arts, Newport, RI, 1989 (solo)

会员： ANA; NA; SAA; NSMP; AIA; NIAL; Am. Acad. Artists; Century Assn.

工作： NMAA; CGA; BMFA; MMA; RISD; Williams Col. Mus. Art; Fogg Art Mus.; Carnegie Mus.; Honolulu Acad. Arts; Addison Gal. Am. Art, Andover. Murals and stained glass discussed below.

评论： One of the leading artists of the Aesthetic movement, he was one of the pioneers in the mural revival of the late 19th century and an innovator in stained glass; he also excelled at watercolor and was an important critic and aesthetician. As early as 1860, he was influenced by the composition of Japanese prints. Between 1859-67, he produced his most important floral still-life paintings, which capture in oil the fleeting effects of light and color and combine elements of French, Japanese, and Pre-Raphaelite influences. During the years 1867-71, he also began producing landscapese and these represented half of his exhibited works at the NAD. A trip to Europe in 1872-73 reinforced his interest in stained glass and mural decoration. La Farge received his first opportunity to do important decorative work In 1876, when H.H. Richardson, the architect of Trinity Church, Boston, asked him to take complete charge of the interior design of that church, resulting in the first significant mural painting in America. His other works of this type include the decorations of St. Thomas' Church, NY (begun in 1877 and destroyed by fire in 1905); encaustic murals and 15 pairs of stained glass windows in the Newport Congregational Church (1880); the panels in the Church of the Incarnation; and his masterpiece, the mural "The Ascension" for the end wall above the altar in the Church of the Ascension, NY, which was painted in 1885. Other mural decorations by him are in the Church of the Paulist Fathers, NY; the Court House, Baltimore; and the Capitol at St. Paul, Minnesota. In the early 1870s he became interested in the practical problems of glass-making and gradually evolved the method of glass overlays (plating) and the use of opalescent glass. He had designed the windows for Trinity Church before his experiments with this new method, which he then used first in orders for private houses. One of his most important windows, undertaken in 1878, is the so-called Battle Window in Memorial Hall at Harvard; others are the "Watson Memorial Window" in the Trinity Church of Buffalo, and the windows in the Church of the Ascension, NYC. Later came a series of jewel-like flower panels in the private homes of Cornelius Vanderbilt (NYC), Henry Marquand, William C. Whitney, and others. His last work of this type, The Peacock," was purchased by Worcester Museum of Art. In all, he made several thousand windows, some monumental and others only small notes in the decorative scheme. In 1885-87, he returned to watercolor still- life painting, and made his last floral watercolor in 1890. LaFarge was also noted as a painter of scenes in the South Pacific, having traveled to Hawaii, Samoa, and Japan in 1890; he was in Tahiti just a week before Gauguin, in 1891; then in Fiji, Australia, Ceylon, and Java. His lecture series, Considerations on Painting, given at the MMA, 1893, was published in 1895; his lectures on the Barbizon school, given at the AIC, 1903, were published in 1908 as The Higher Life in Art. In 1910, he suffered a nervous breakdown from which he never recovered. Additional publications: An Artist's Letters from Japan (1897).

来源： G&W; WW10; the early, principal biography of LaFarge, published the year after his death, is Royal Cortissoz's John LaFarge: A Memoir and a Study. E.A. Park's Mural Painters in America, Part I, has a long bibliography on LaFarge. More recently, see K. Foster, "The Still-Life Painting of John LaFarge" American Art Journal (July 1979); Baigell, Dictionary; Naylor, NAD; exh. cat., Vareika Fine Arts, Newport, 1989; and especially Henry Adams, et. al., John La Farge, exhibition cat. (Carnegie Mus., NMAA, and Abbeville, 1987); Forbes, Encounters with Paradise, 218-20; Rbt. Workman, The Eden of America (RISD, 1986, p.44); Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons, 364; Falk, Exh. Record Series.