Delacroix. On his return to New York he entered a lawyer’s office, for, as he says, “no one has struggled more against his destiny than I; nor did I for many years acquiesce in being a painter, though I learned the methods and studied the problems of my art. I had hoped to find some other mode of life, some other way of satisfying the desire for a contemplation of truth, unbiassed, free, and detached.” His friendship with William Hunt may have decided him in his career, or his marriage in 1860, which established him in Newport, R.I. This brief summary represents quite a remarkable method of evolution for an artist; one that could not be adopted with impunity by many young men, its very leisureliness offering temptations, of which the least evil result might be dilettanteism. But La Farge was freed from the danger by the possession of moral and mental stamina, the breadth of his sympathies even demanding this gradual development. Nor was it unaccompanied with strenuousness of interest in [Illustration: Copyright, 1898, by John La Farge. ATHENS. Decorative painting in the Walker Art Gallery, Bowdoin College. BY JOHN LA FARGE.] [Illustration: John La Farge. ALTAR PIECE--Church of the Ascension, New York. BY JOHN LA FARGE.] the various phases of culture, of which art began by being one and grew to be the most absorbing. It was significant that this dreamer should be attracted especially by the nature students among the living painters. That was indicative of the depth and sincerity of his contemplations. But it is still more significant that from the start he should have commenced a critical study of the problems of colour; this proved the independence of his sincerity. Another point of great significance, as affecting his subsequent career, is that, although he afterward made a close study of anatomy, in his apprentice days he seems to have drawn from drawings rather than from the living model, studying, in fact, the abstract made by others instead of the concrete directly studied by himself. Thus the habit of his mind was directed toward the generalization and significance of the figure rather than to its anatomical facts. This made him very early an enthusiastic admirer of Japanese art, and has proved at once the strength and weakness of his subsequent treatment of the figure.