JOHN LA FARGE 1835-1910
Kwannon Meditating on Human Life, 1908
Oil on canvas, 36 X 34" (91.44 x 86.36 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Museum purchase, 918-0-106

Perhaps the most versatile American artist of his time, John La Farge produced innovative flower and landscape paintings which anticipated the work of the French Impressionists, created the first major American mural programs, assembled stunning stained glass windows, and executed remarkable watercolors of Japan and the South Seas.
In the late 1850s and early 1860s, La Farge became a pioneer in collecting Japanese art and incorporating Japanese effects into his work. He may have purchased his first Japanese prints in Paris in 1856, and this interest was probably encouraged by his marriage in 1860 to Margaret Perry, niece of the Commodore who had opened Japan to the West. By the early 1860s, La Farge was not only collecting Japanese prints, but was also making use of Japanese compositional ideas in his paintings to create effects which looked strange, empty, and unbalanced by Western standards. In 1869, La Farge published an essay on Japanese art, the first ever written by a Western artist, in which he particularly noted the asymmetrical compositions, high horizons, and clear, heightened color of Japanese prints.
The radical qualities of La Farge's art in the 1860s were tempered during the following decades. Beginning with Trinity Church in Boston, the first major decorative project in this country executed by a painter, he became increasingly involved in large scale decorative and mural projects, both for churches and the residences of America's emerging class of millionaires. In the 1870s and early 1880s, he began to style his own work on that of the European old masters.
In 1886, La Farge embarked for Japan with his friend Henry Adams, whose wife had just committed suicide. Seeking escape in travel, he asked La Farge to join him. No doubt, partially due to his personal unhappiness, Adams was highly critical of what he saw in Japan. Nonetheless, he seems to have been deeply moved by the Japanese statues of Kwarmon, the embodiment of the wisdom of compassion. After returning to the United States, Adams commissioned the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create a similar figure for his wife's grave in Rock Creek
Cemetery, Washington, D.C., delegating to La Farge the task of supervising the sculptor, and of explaining to him the Japanese concept of Kwarmon. La Farge's painting of Kwannon can be seen as an offshoot of this statue, now often titled "the Adams Memorial," as well as a reaction to the paintings of Kwannon that he viewed when he was in Japan.
His attitude towards Japanese art at this late stage of his career, however, had changed greatly since the 1860s. In the 1860s he was looking for new approaches and new viewpoints; in his later life he was interested in reaffirming the lessons of the European old masters. Ernest Fenollosa later described taking La Farge to the Daitokuji Temple in Kyoto to see the famous painting by Mokkei, which showed Kwannon seated in a rocky cave, with water washing at her feet. "The old priest was delighted to have it specially brought out for such a sage," Fenollosa recalled. "Mr. La Farge, devout Catholic as he is, could hardly restrain a bending of his head as he muttered, 'Raphael."' Given this bias towards a synthesis of Oriental and Western ideas, it is not surprising that La Farge's Kwannon has a rather Western appearance, merging the Japanese deity with the Madonna of Roman Catholicism.
According to La Farge's studio assistant, Ivan Olinsky, the painting was based on an earlier drawing. "One day," Olinsky recalled, "while rummaging amongst a lot of old truck I came upon a drawing which to my young mind seemed unusually beautiful. I called La Farge's attention to it and perhaps it was due to my youthful enthusiasm that the Butler Kwannon was painted." Work on the painting seems to have proceeded over a long period, starting sometime after La Farge's return from Japan. The French novelist, Paul Bourget, mentioned it in his book, Outre Mer (1895), in which he described visiting La Farge's studio. According to an old inscription on the painting, now largely obliterated, but visible in an old photograph, it was completed in 1908, two years before the artist's death.

HENRY ADAMS