Stained Glass Art With Real Flowers in the Middle From 1874
John LaFarge Stained Glass Windows in Western New York
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John La Farge (1835-1910) was an American painter, stained glass window maker, decorator, and writer.
Born in New York City to wealthy French �migr� Roman Cosmic parents, La Farge grew up in a cultured French-speaking household. He received a Cosmic educational activity at St. John'due south College (later Fordham) in New York and at Mt. Saint Mary's College in Maryland, where he graduated in 1853.
Uncertain most a career in police that he began to pursue, he went to Paris in 1856 and briefly studied painting with Thomas Couture. Returning to New York, he took a space in the new 10th Street Studio Edifice. In 1859 he went to work with painter William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, but soon left the studio to paint directly from nature, inspired past Newport's cute environment and his own advanced approach to aesthetics. It was in Newport during the 1860s and early 1870s that some critics suggest that La Farge produced the start impressionist experiments painted on American soil and also some of the virtually cute bloom paintings always created.
In the tardily 1850s and early 1860s, La Farge became a pioneer in collecting Japanese art and incorporating Japanese furnishings into his work. He may have purchased his get-go Japanese prints in Paris in 1856, and this interest was probably encouraged past his union in 1860 to Margaret Perry (with whom he had 10 children), niece of the Commodore who had opened Japan to the West. Past the early 1860s, La Farge was not just collecting Japanese prints, but was as well making apply of Japanese compositional ideas in his paintings to create furnishings which looked strange, empty, and unbalanced by Western standards. In 1869, La Farge published an essay on Japanese fine art, the first ever written by a Western artist, in which he specially noted the asymmetrical compositions, high horizons, and clear, heightened color of Japanese prints.
La Farge began his career as a painter of landscapes and figure compositions. Hewas commissioned in 1876 to decorate H. H. Richardson's Trinity Church, Boston. This was the first existent mural painting in America and marks an epoch in art: he is considered the father of the American landscape movement. Thereafter, he engaged primarily in mural painting and designing stained glass.
(The LaFarge Decorative Art Company was dissolved in October 1885, leaving La Farge an independent agent.)
LaFarge achieved international fame for his stained glass at the 1889 Exposition Universale in Paris where he won commencement prize with his entry The Sealing of the Twelve Tribes . The French authorities offered to buy the window after the Exposition, but the window was a committee by a Buffalonian and the window was (and still is) installed in Buffalo. In 1901 he was awarded a golden medal at the Pan- American Exposition at Buffalo.
A lifelong Roman Cosmic, he did much of his all-time work for churches. His splendid windows may be seen in the churches of Buffalo, Northward.Y., and Worcester, Mass., and in the chapels of Harvard and Columbia universities.
La Farge worked in many media. His watercolors and drawings are well known, particularly those commemorating his visit to the South Seas in 1886. His easel paintings are in many leading American museums. His writings and lectures on art are distinguished for their urbanity and judgment.
LaFarge's contributions to stained drinking glass technique include the following:
- The evolution and use of opalescent glass - at present more often than not known equally American stained glass - which he kickoff patented in 1880
- Incorporating molded drinking glass embellishments into his creations, usually in the shapes of jewels or flowers
- Plating, the layering of glass pieces directly on pinnacle of each other to reach detailed depth and minimize the demand for painting
- Use of thin copper wire or foil to supervene upon heavy lead lines, techniques that made possible the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany
For an instructive description of some of LaFarge's techniques, meet Trinity Church, Boston - Condition Study
LaFarge and Tiffany
50 a Farge's intense admiration for the monuments of the past and his commitment to innovation of the present encouraged his experimentation with opalescent drinking glass. The material evoked an older, tactile adornment of early Christian stone inlay and mosaic.
La Farge after described his combining selected stained glass in a variety of tones and a new material, an opalescent type of commercial glass previously used mainly every bit a porcelain substitute in toiletries such equally brushes and mirrors.
He applied for a patent for these techniques in November 1879. The awarding makes it clear that he did not claim to take invented the milky glass of variegated color we now call opalescent. Rather, he claimed a patent for its utilise in plated stained-drinking glass windows where areas of the window are comprised of several layers of drinking glass stacked one on pinnacle of the other and leaded together. Plating adds depth to the play of color and light in the composition.
With such work, La Farge was seen as a designer of hope, and in 1880 Herter Brothers, a decorating firm in New York, hired him to provide windows for the homes of American millionaires,including Cyrus W. Field, Darius Ogden Mills, andJ. Pierpont Morgan in New York.
- Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Stained Glass: From Its Origins to the Present, 2003, p. 229-30
"L a Farge and [Louis C.] Tiffany, dissatisfied with the anemic colors and poor quality of bachelor window glass, experimented with novel types of materials, achieving a more varied palette with richer hues and greater density. Working independently, they explored the pictorial, coloristic, and textural qualities of stained glass in new and daring ways that completely inverse the look of the medium. By 1881, each artist had patented an opalescent glass, which has a milky, opaque, and sometimes rainbow-hued appearance when light shines through it. It was a uniquely American phenomenon that proved to be among the most important advances in decorative windows since the Centre Ages."
- Louis Comfort Tiffany at the Metropolitan Museum. 1998 catalog
J ohn La Farge is known as the inventor of the opalescent stained drinking glass window and is the begetter of the American mural movement in the tardily nineteenth century. He was regarded as the premier American muralist of his time and an eloquent art critic. La Farge studied painting in France and with William Morris Chase of Newport, Rhode Island.
La Farge'southward earliest opalescent glass experiments were conducted at Francis Thill's drinking glass house in Brooklyn; glass discs made by James Baker, a Manhattan window artist, also inspired La Farge. La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany independently financed the experimental production of opalescent window glass conducted at Louis Heidt's glass house, likewise in Brooklyn. Tiffany quickly began the production of pressed glass tiles.
La Farge and Tiffany's friendship came to a bitter end over the rights to apply opalescent glass in windows, which La Farge patented in 1880. Tiffany filed a similar patent in 1881.
Their glass experiments resulted in opalescent glass with multiple colors mixed in the same sheet. Under their direction, confetti glass; streamer; ridged; drape; and thick, faceted glass nuggets and chunks were made at Heidt's shop. Several glass houses also fabricated great varieties of pressed glass jewels. In 1887, Kokomo Opalescent Glass Company began product; in 1889, they won a gold medal at the Paris World Exposition for their multi-colored window drinking glass.
- Shaw Creek Bird Supply: American Opalescent Glass
T he creation of opalescent glass in the 1870s was independently arrived at by both Tiffany and John LaFarge (1835-1910), and enabled the artists to make glass containing exaggerated textures and colour variations, and then to use those variations every bit role of their compositions.
La Farge probably deserves the credit for first conceiving the idea of window designs based on patterning and variations within the glass itself.
However, opalescent windows based on abstruse and geometrical designs were introduced by Tiffany, who is as well considered the creator of the landscape windows in opalescent glass.
- Discovering Stained Glass in Detroit , by Nola Huse Tutag. Detroit: Wayne State U. Press, 1987, p. 153 (Tabular array of Contents at the bottom of the page)
We besides find the phenomenon of the out-of-house designer, every bit well every bit the studio with designers working exclusively as a squad of glass cutters, painters and fabricators. La Farge, Tiffany, and David Maitland Armstrong (1836-1918), painters and later designers of stained glass, never actually touched the window.
They may have provided designs and supervised execution, but they were non the artists who cut or painted the drinking glass or assembled the window into its frame.
- Virgina Chieffo Raguin, Stained Glass from its Origins to the Present. 2003, p. 230
B eginning in 1874 in his work with stained drinking glass, Lafarge discovered a new technique for creating stained glass. He began to layer two or more than pieces of glass, rather than painting directly on the original pane, and thus he invented opalescent glass. He received a patent for his new product on February 24, 1880. Tiffany, a member of the family renowned for their silver business firm, received several patents for variations of the same opalescent procedure in November of the aforementioned twelvemonth. La Farge was persuaded past Tiffany with hints of a hereafter partnership and possible collaborations to waive his patent. The promises never materialized while contest and antagonism grew betwixt the two artists.
LaFarge and Tiffany used intricate cuts and richly colored glasses within detailed, flowing designs. Plating, or layering drinking glass layers, accomplished depth and texture.
Both made windows for individual homes as well every bit churches.
Eventually Tiffany became the darling of the Gilded Age industrialists and he created a glass and decorating studio that boasted more than than a hundred workers. La Farge remained the lonely creative person who contracted out fabrication of his designs to smaller studios.
Both LaFarge and Tiffany secured their glass from the Kokomo glass factory in Kokomo, Indiana, after it became a reliable source for them in 1888.
Beyond Tiffany and La Farge, a plethora of stained glass studios adult in America around the plough of the century.
LaFarge murals:
- Trinity Church building, Boston, MA:
- Jesus Teaches Nicodemus,
- Christ with a Woman at the Well
La Farge windows in Western, NY:
- Trinity Episcopal Church, Buffalo:
- Five Chancel Windows
- The Lord is My Shepherd Chapel
- The Sealing of the Twelve Tribes Chapel
- Jesus Appears to James Nave
- The Good Samaritan Nave
- St. Catherine's rose window
- St. Peter'southward Episcopal Church building, Niagara Falls, NY: The Annunciation
Exterior of Western, NY:
- Trinity Church, Boston, MA:
- Christ Preaching
- Presentation of the Virgin
- Memorial Hall, Harvard: The Battle Window / Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi / Vergil and Homer (online July 2013)
- Corning Glass Museum: Parick W. Ford House Window (online July 2013)
- Detroit Institute of Arts: First Unitarian Church building, Detroit, MI Michigan Stained Glass Census (online July 2013)
Source: https://buffaloah.com/a/DCTNRY/stained/lafarge.html
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