American Painting and its Tradition by John C. Van Dyke

La Farge is an exceptional man in American painting -- the exception that will perhaps prove the value of tradition and education in the craft. More than any other in our history he was born to art. He did not live through a barefoot stage on a farm and then by chance come to a speaking acquaintance with painting at twenty or thereabouts; he could not boast of a struggle against adverse circumstances in an uncongenial environment. On the contrary, he was rather luxuriously raised in a city, and as a child found art in the family circle and a part of the family life. He had begun to see, hear, and think about it at six years of age. At thirty, when he definitely decided to accept painting as a vocation, he knew the tale quite well, was highly endowed intellectually, and had the insight and the imagination to see things in significant aspects. What wonder that he made an impression and left a body of work that voiced authority! He himself became a master, caught up the torch and carried on the light, spreading it and diffusing it in this new world. He was an inheritor and transmitter of art as well as a creator of it.

By that I do not mean that La Farge was raised in a studio and trained in hand and eye like a Florentine apprentice, but rather that his family, with its collateral branches, was made up of highly educated dilettanti, and art as a theme was ever up with them for discussion and appreciation. He grasped it historically and esthetically long before he took it up professionally. The practical processes were taught him, to some extent, even as a child; but the philosophy came first and remained with him to the last. It was the French philosophy of taste -- the best of the time -- and La Farge himself was French save for the accident of his birth here in New York. It was the tradition of Delacroix that he finally accepted and transplanted here in American soil, adding to it, of course, his own profound thought and fine feeling. "He prided himself on faithfulness to tradition and convention," according to his long-time friend Henry Adams.