The great uncle was in sympathy with the classic and the academic, stood up for David and Guérin, and looked askance at everything new; but the cousin, Paul de St. Victor, was the champion of the younger men. La Farge was between two fires in the home and listened to both sides when he went abroad. He met Gérôme, then a young man, frequented the house of Chasseriau, heard much of the controversy between Ingres and Delacroix. He never met Delacroix, but was profoundly impressed by his works. He was also much impressed at this early time by the glass in the Paris churches, and during a trip to Brussels met Henry Le Strange, who had decorated Ely Cathedral, and through him became interested in methods of mural painting. The father in America thought that his son was wasting his time and wrote him urging that he take up art seriously. The result was that La Farge went to Couture’s studio and had a talk with the master. He did not even then think of art as a profession, and wanted from Couture not so much technical education as general education in art. He spent only two weeks in the studio and then set about copying the drawings of the old masters in the Louvre. Presently he went to Munich and afterward to Dresden, copying in each place more of the drawings of the old masters. He thought this a logical and very serious way of learning art. And so it was. In copying the drawings he got at the understructure whereas in the paintings he got only the surface. La Farge from first to last was always seeking the logical, philosophical, and scientific bases of things. And meanwhile thereby “I kept in touch with that greatest of all characters of art, style--not the style of the academy or any one man, but the style of all the schools, the manner of looking at art which is common to all important personalities, however fluctuating its form may be.” In Copenhagen he made a copy of a Rembrandt. “I was enabled to learn a great deal of the methods of Rembrandt and to connect them with my studies.... Rubens I followed in Belgium, trying to see every painting of his throughout the whole kingdom and as many of his pupils’ as I could gather in.” He had an admiration for the severe training of Rubens and for his later prodigal expenditure of energy and paint on canvas. In the autumn of 1857-1858 he was studying Titian, Velasquez, and many others of the famous masters at the Manchester Exhibition in England. There also he saw and studied the Preraphaelite painters and became acquainted with several of them. “They made a very great and important impression upon me, which later influenced me in my first work when I began to paint.”