As for the house, he speaks of it as being “really very elegant” and regarding the pictures on the walls, he says: “The influences which I felt as a little boy were those of the paintings and the works of art that surrounded me at home.” There were examples in the house of Vernet, Le Moyne, Salvator Rosa, Sebastiano del Piombo, many Dutch pictures, particularly “a beautiful Salomon Rysdael.” “It so happened that my very first teachings were those of the eighteenth century and my training has covered almost a century and a half.” At six he had wished to draw and paint, and was handed over to his maternal grandfather to be taught. The grandfather had been ruined by his Santo Domingo losses, and in his age had no other resource than to fall back upon the polite learning he had acquired in his youth. He took up miniature painting and gave drawing lessons because, as La Farge explained it, “it was in the family.” “On a small scale he was an exquisite painter. He was also a good teacher and started me at six years old in the traditions of the eighteenth century.... The teaching was as mechanical as it could be and was rightly based upon the notion that a boy ought to be taught so as to know his trade. There was not the slightest alleviation and no suggestion of this being ‘art.’” He was taught to sharpen crayons, to fasten paper, to draw parallel lines, and produce a tint. Gradually he came to copy such things as engravings. The work became more interesting, and at eight he could do something that had resemblance to an original. Later he copied everything that came to hand and was free to do as he pleased. In the meantime his general education was not neglected. His grandmother Binsse de St. Victor had opened a school for young ladies which was very successful. La Farge as a boy took lessons under her, and in his reminiscences recalls the severity of his drilling in eighteenth-century French. He got English from an English governess, and some German from an Alsatian nurse. Then came books and school and the dreariness of lessons on dry themes. He was sent to Columbia Grammar School, passed into Columbia College, changed over to Fordham, and finally, in 1853, graduated at Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland.