A versatile artist and facile writer, John La Farge was born in New York City on March 31, 1835. His parents were born in France. His father, a successful businessman, had invested wisely in real estate, and his mother, the daughter of emigres, came from a distinguished Parisian family. In his bilingual home La Farge grew up looking at paintings and reading books ranging from Homer to Voltaire. Since he loved to draw and paint, his mother’s father, Louis Binsse de Saint-Victor, a fine miniaturist, gave him lessons. La Farge attended the grammar school connected with Columbia University, entered St. John’s College (now part of Fordham University), and graduated in 1853 from St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Following his father’s wish, La Farge studied law from 1853 to 1856, but he could not overcome his doubts about pursuing a law career.
A trip with his brothers to Paris, to meet their Saint-Victor relations, enabled La Farge, with his father’s blessing, to explore and develop his interest in art and literature. Through his mother’s cousin Paul, a distinguished critic, La Farge visited literary salons and painters’ ateliers and studied briefly in the studio of Thomas Couture. Recognizing a unique talent, Couture befriended La Farge and advised him to study and copy drawings in the Louvre. He followed that congenial advice and traveled widely in northern Europe copying drawings and paintings, until he was called home in fall 1857 by his father’s serious illness. La Farge resumed studying law until his father died and left him enough money to study art. He went to Newport, Rhode Island, to work with William Morris Hunt, a Couture student, and fell in love with Margaret Mason Perry, the granddaughter of the naval hero Oliver Hazard Perry. La Farge and Perry married on October 15, 1860, and had 10 children, seven of whom lived to be adults.
La Farge’s study with Hunt was short lived. Hunt had moved from Couture’s realistic figure painting to genre scenes bathed in natural light, characteristic of the Barbi-zon school, which La Farge did not appreciate. Pursuing an independent course, La Farge taught himself through trial and error and achieved some success. He was fascinated by the interplay of light and color, studied the science of optics, and utilized it in his major landscapes Paradise Valley (New England Pasture Land) (1866-68) and The Last Valley—Paradise Rocks (1867). Both of these paintings were exhibited widely, received critical acclaim, and enabled La Farge to support his growing family with the sale of modest-sized paintings. In the 1860s La Farge was also in demand as an illustrator, especially of poetry, in magazines and books. In visits to Boston and New York, he made many friends, including the Gilded Age’s leading intellectuals: Henry James and William James, William Dean Howells, Henry Adams, Clarence King, and John Milton Hay.
Architect Henry Hobson Richardson asked La Farge in 1875 to decorate the interior of his masterpiece, Boston’s Trinity Church. The request changed La Farge’s life. His murals accomplished by a crew working under his direction, were so successful that La Farge abandoned easel painting for a new career as a decorative artist. Leaving his wife and family in Newport, he moved his headquarters to New York City and decorated mansions, public buildings, and churches. Besides Boston’s Trinity Church, his decorative masterpieces include the 1904 Supreme Court room in the Minnesota State Capitol (especially Moses on Mount Sinai) and his greatest mural, in New York’s Church of the Ascension.
Decorating churches heightened La Farge’s interest in stained glass, which dated from his first visit to France and was reinforced by an 1873 visit to England, where he saw pre-Raphaelite stained-glass windows. Despite poor health, aggravated by lead poisoning in the pigments he used, La Farge kept experimenting and in 1879 hit on opalescent glass, which he patented in 1880. La Farge subsequently made thousands of stained-glass windows for churches and private homes.
Despite his commissions, La Farge lost money, especially in stained glass. A perfectionist, he kept on experimenting. After going bankrupt in 1883, he took on partners, with whom he fell out. Even though he was exonerated when they charged him with grand larceny, his reputation suffered and commissions fell off. Rather than La Farge, Louis Comfort Tiffany scored the big commercial success from his development of opalescent glass.
His commercial shortcomings enabled La Farge to travel and write. In 1886, at the invitation of Henry Adams, La Farge accompanied him to Japan and in 1890 to 1891 to the South Sea islands. In almost 300 watercolors and in An Artist's Letters from Japan (1897) and Reminiscences of the South Seas (1912), La Farge captured exotic scenes vividly and eloquently. He was also a gifted lecturer on art at both the Metropolitan Museum in New York (1893) and the Art Institute of Chicago (1903). His lectures were published as Considerations on Painting (1895) and The Higher Life in Art (1908). At the end of his life, his creditors took his estate for debts. His wife, who cared for him until she had to put him in a mental hospital, used her own funds to pay off his other debts. La Farge died on November 14, 1910, in Providence, Rhode Island.
Further reading: Henry Adams, et al., John La Farge: Essays (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987); H. Barbara Weinberg, The Decorative Work of John La Farge (New York: Garland Press, 1977); James L. Yarnall, John La Farge: Watercolors and Drawings (Yonkers, N. Y.: Hudson River Museum of Westchester, 1991); James L. Yarnall, Recreation and Idleness: The Pacific Travels of John La Farge (New York: Vance Jordan Fine Art, 1998).
Langston, John Mercer (1829-1897) activist, educator, lawyer
John Mercer Langston was born on December 14, 1829, in Louisa County, Virginia, the son of Ralph Quarles, a white planter, and Lucy Langston, his freed slave. After his parents died in 1834, Langston was raised by a white couple in Ohio and in 1844 entered the preparatory department at Oberlin College, an antislavery hotbed. There he became active in the antislavery cause, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1849 and in 1853 a graduate degree in theology.
Langston did not enter the ministry (largely because the churches had failed to oppose slavery), choosing instead to read law under the tutelage of Philemon Bliss, and in 1854 he was admitted to the Ohio bar.
Langston in 1854 also helped establish the Republican Party in the Western Reserve in northeastern Ohio and married Caroline Matilda Wall, whom he had met at Oberlin. The following year he was elected town clerk in Brownhelm, Ohio, becoming the first of his race elected to office in the United States by popular vote. Technically, Langston was considered “white” because Ohio’s law considered those with at least 51 percent Caucasian “blood” to be white. Langston, however, choosing to be black, optimistically wrote to Frederick Douglass that his victory “argues the steady march of the antislavery sentiment, and augurs the inevitable destruction and annihilation of American prejudice against colored men.” Langston added that more black voters were needed to have political influence, for it represented “the bridle by which we can check and guide to our advantage the selfishness of American demagogues.”
Langston was a militant reformer. He helped maintain Ohio’s Underground Railroad for runaway slaves and in
1858 defied the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 by participating in the rescue of John Price. In 1858 he organized and served as president of the all-black Ohio State Anti-Slavery Society. Langston also protested discrimination at home. Although Ohio’s racist “black laws” had been repealed in 1848-49, African Americans still could not vote and did not have the “bridle” Langston knew they needed. Like many of his abolitionist contemporaries, Langston was an advocate of women’s rights and temperance. During the early 1850s he supported emigration and black separatism, but he changed his view after attending the 1854 Cleveland Emigration Convention and devoted his life to a vigorous defense of integration. Langston conspired with John Brown but did not participate in the latter’s ill-fated
1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry to arm slaves in Virginia.
Langston saw the Civil War and its aftermath as an opportunity to destroy American slavery and achieve equality for African Americans. He was a chief recruiter in the West for the Union during the war years, and from 1864 to 1868 he served as president of the all-black Equal Rights League. The Reconstruction period was both a time of opportunity and of peril for former slaves. As an inspector for the Freedmen’s Bureau, Langston toured the South in 1867, urging the freedmen and women to seek education, political equality, and economic justice. In Washington, D. C., he organized Howard University’s law department in 1869, and from 1873 to 1875 he served as that institution’s acting president, only to resign in disappointment when he was not named its permanent president.
Langston was a leading Republican spokesman for African Americans and served that party in various capacities. As the legal officer of the District of Columbia’s Board of Health (1871-77), he drew up Washington’s sanitation code. He also helped Senator Charles Sumner draft the Civil Rights Act (1875). From 1877 to 1885 he was consul general and resident minister to Haiti. Upon returning to the United States in 1885, Langston assumed the presidency of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute at Petersburg, but within two years Democratic pressure forced him to resign. Langston turned to politics and decided to represent Virginia’s mostly black Fourth Congressional District, but General William Mahone, a former Confederate general and Republican leader, opposed having a black man in Congress. Langston ran as an independent and won a bitterly fought campaign in 1888, but the results were contested. Langston was finally admitted to Congress in 1890 but was defeated in his bid that year for reelection, serving out his “lame duck” session until March 1891.
Langston then returned to Washington where he practiced law. In 1894 he published his autobiography, From the Virginia Flawtation to the National Capitol. When Langston died in Washington on November 15, 1897, he had—despite the current rampant disfranchisement and segregation—faith that “in the courts, by the law” African Americans would achieve the equality that was their right as citizens.
Further reading: William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Maurine Christopher, America's Black Congressmen (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1971).
—William Seraile
World History
