American Masters of Painting: Being Brief Appreciations of Some American PaintersCaffin, Charles H. (Charles Henry)
General
American Masters of Painting: Being Brief Appreciations of Some American Painters
Caffin, Charles H. (Charles Henry)
Painters -- United States
all kinds of variety in the texture, quality, thickness, and even
pattern of the glass, and also almost every variation of density and
transparence. It is a palette of extraordinary range, perilously
serviceable in the hands of an ambitious person of meagre knowledge and
feeling, quite susceptive of commonplace exploitation in those of the
ordinary designer. But in the hands of a true artist, who thinks in
colour, and has a store of gathered observations backed with scientific
assurance, it permits the fullest scope to his imagination, and the
opportunity of realizing the most diverse and complex schemes of colour,
allowing him to reproduce much of the mystery that time has wrought into
the mediæval stained glass, and to add to the latter’s chantlike
simplicity of colour and structure the complicated harmonies of modern
music. It is an art, indeed, that brings the decorator within measurable
distance of the musical composer.
The new intent of this glass and the subsequent developments which have
made of it a new fabric were so much the outcome of La Farge’s personal
need of expression that it is not surprising he has reached results
superior to those of others who employ the same medium. A reason which
also contributes to his superiority is that his conception from the
start formulates itself in colour, whereas the genesis of most windows
would appear to be in the lineal design, clothed in colour afterward. In
other words, like every true craftsman, La Farge thinks in his material.
The effect of this has been, at least, twofold. In the first place,
there has always been a reciprocity of influence between his imagination
and his material; while he has been big enough to anticipate the
possibilities, he has been big enough also to accept the limitations of
the medium. In the second place,--and this really follows from the
former,--he has preserved an independence in the character of the
design, neither attempting to reproduce that of the old cathedral
windows, nor dipping, except occasionally, into that universal cook-book
of the average designer, the ornament of the Renaissance. With a larger
sense of fitness he found, if anywhere, a prototype for his motives in
Eastern art, not only in the mosaics of Byzantium, but in the jewelled
inlays, lacquers, textiles, and _cloisonné_ of Japan. Particularly is
this true of the windows of pure decoration which he has executed for
private houses and again of those superb windows in the west end of
Trinity Church in Boston. In these a cultivated taste will be disposed
to feel that the splendour and mystery of the fabric are most abundantly
manifested. It is pure decoration of the most subtle and resplendent
kind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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