He was a student of art long before he entered upon it as a profession. It attracted him first as a form of culture, the practice coming later; quite an inversion of the usual progress of the art student, who gets manual facility and then culture--sometimes. Nor did art in his early days present the only form of culture. He received a classical training of the thorough sort that promotes an intimacy with classic thought and expression. His father’s house in Washington Square, well stocked with books and pictures, was the rendezvous of cultivated people, many of them _émigrés_ of the French Revolution or refugees from St. Domingo. When he visited Europe in 1856 he stayed in Paris at the home of his relatives, the St. Victors, where lived his bedridden great-uncle, author of many works, historical, critical, and artistic, who had known friends and foes of the French Revolution, had been an _émigré_ in Russia and still retained his interest in all things, even to the theatres. Paul de St. Victor, writer and critic, was La Farge’s cousin, and many remarkable and gifted people came to the house,--Russians, members of the Institute, priests, art critics, and literary men, among them Charles Blanc and Théophile Gautier. La Farge had been taught to draw in a precise, old-fashioned way by his grandfather, Binsse de St. Victor, a miniature painter of some talent, and during his visit to Europe he was advised by his father to study painting under some master, partly as an accomplishment, partly as an escape from a desultory interest in many things. He, therefore, entered the studio of Couture, who, however, recommended him to postpone painting and to study and copy the drawings of the old masters in the Louvre. “With quite a comprehension of my inevitable failure,” he says, “I made drawings from Correggio, Leonardo, and others; but my greatest fascination was Rembrandt in his etchings.” Later he followed the drawings of the old masters in Munich and Dresden, giving up an invitation to accompany Paul de St. Victor and Charles Blanc in a tour of northern Italy. “I have never known,” he writes, “whether I did well or ill, for I cannot tell what the effect upon me might have been of the inevitable impression of the great Italian paintings, seen in their own light and their native place.” He means at that period of his development, for he saw them later. Next he made a short stay in England and became acquainted with the works of the pre-Raphaelites, who did not seem disconnected from the charm of Sir Joshua and Gainsborough, or from the glories of Turner, “which yet offended by its contradiction of the urbanity and sincerity of the great masters whom I cared for most.” But the willingness of the pre-Raphaelites to meet many great problems of colour attracted him and confirmed him in the direction of his own study of colour. However, the most important European developments of that time seemed to him to be represented by Rousseau, Corot, Millet, and