La Farge, John (1835-1910)

US painter and ecclesiastical designer. He is credited with the revival of stained glass in America and also created woodcuts, watercolours, and murals. Lafarge visited Europe 1856 and the Far East 1886. In the 1870s he turned from landscape painting (inspired by the French painter Corot) to religious and still-life painting. Decorating the newly built Trinity Church in Boston, Massachusetts, he worked alongside the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

He first studied with his grandfather, a miniaturist, went to Europe in 1856, and worked in Paris in the studio of Couture. A visit to England aroused his admiration for the Pre-Raphaelites, some of whom he met, and his own work in stained glass for churches and mansions in the USA has some parallel with that of Morris and Burne-Jones. He travelled in Japan and the South Seas 1886, making pictorial records of life in Samoa, in which he found a ‘classic’ dignity.