John La Farge

John La Farge was born on March 31, 1835, in New York City to French immigrant parents. He was educated in Jesuit schools, completing his secondary studies at St. John's College in Fordham, New York, around 1852, then graduating from Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg, Maryland, with a bachelor's degree and a master's degree, the latter probably in law; sources give the graduation year as either 1853 or 1855. He returned to New York to study law, as his family intended, while his interest in painting grew.

In 1856 La Farge traveled to Paris, where he studied briefly with the academic painter Thomas Couture. Back in the United States, he moved to Newport, Rhode Island, in 1858 to study with William Morris Hunt, under whose guidance he developed his own approach to color and composition.

La Farge built his reputation through mural and decorative commissions, most notably his work on the interior of Trinity Church in Boston in the late 1870s, and through his invention of an opalescent glass technique that let him build color and depth directly into the glass rather than relying only on paint. His stained glass windows were installed in churches and public buildings across the country, and in 1889 he exhibited stained glass at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where the jury awarded him a first-class medal and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor for his work in glass. He also traveled in the Pacific, producing watercolors and writings related to his travels. He was one of the first seven artists elected to the newly formed American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1904. John La Farge died on November 14, 1910, in Providence, Rhode Island, at the age of seventy-five.

La Farge's stained glass was recognized in his own lifetime as a genuine technical and artistic innovation. According to an account of the 1889 Exposition Universelle preserved by Boston College Libraries, the jury that awarded him the Legion of Honor praised him as the inventor of an entirely new art and industry in glass. The dealer and critic Siegfried Bing, better known as a champion of La Farge's rival Louis Comfort Tiffany, is reported by the same source to have praised the brilliance of La Farge's Trinity Church window of Christ in Majesty. Twentieth-century institutional recognition followed a similar arc, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, both mounting exhibitions of his work in 1936, placing him alongside contemporaries such as Winslow Homer in the American canon.

La Farge's auction market spans paintings, watercolors, and stained glass panels, reflecting the range of his practice. Aggregated auction data from MutualArt puts his record price for a painting at approximately USD 2,096,000; the specific work, auction house, and exact sale date behind that figure are not independently confirmed in the sources available and are not asserted here. No documented sale is known to have surpassed that figure as of this writing. His works, including stained glass panels separated from their original architectural settings, continue to appear at auction, with hundreds of recorded lots across public sale platforms.

There is no catalogue raisonne for La Farge, and much of his output exists as architectural stained glass, which complicates both attribution and comparison to painting sales. Because the specific work, house, and date behind his reported auction high are not independently confirmed, collectors should treat the approximately USD 2.1 million figure as a benchmark rather than a precisely documented data point. La Farge has no current exclusive gallery representation, as would be expected for an artist who died in 1910; specialist dealers in historic American art, including Hirschl & Adler in New York and William Vareika Fine Arts in Newport, Rhode Island, handle his work today, so provenance research and dealer expertise carry more weight than they would for an artist with an active, centralized market.