I have helped myself largely to Mr. Cortissoz’s book (for which I am sure he will not quarrel with me) regarding these educational happenings of La Farge’s early days, because they point to an unusual acquaintance with philosophic, literary, and artistic traditions. La Farge was saturated with them at twenty-two. His education was extraordinary when compared with his American contemporaries--Inness, Wyant, Martin, Homer. He had found himself before he was thirty and knew what he wanted to say and do, whereas Homer at sixty was still uncertain and groping. Art had come to La Farge almost as a child learns to talk, that is, unconsciously, without great effort. The formulas had been largely thought out for him and he had merely to accept them. With Inness, Wyant, and Martin it was necessary to make their own formulas, work out their own philosophy, establish their own premises. And that, too, after they had come to man’s estate. La Farge had a great advantage over them. He was not only born to art but had it thrust upon him. With his fine natural endowments of mind and eye it is not, perhaps, remarkable that he afterward was able to achieve art in a large way and in more than one department. But he did not rest content with his early experiences. He took up new problems and remained a student to his latest day. His mental curiosity was remarkable. He was always trying to get at the cause or sequence of things. I remember very well arguing at him one day, with undue vehemence perhaps, about some question of the hour, and hearing his quiet answer that it made no difference which of us was right, but that we should go along together and try to get at the truth. That was his Gallic cast of mind. He had no wish or care to put the other fellow in the wrong, and as for disputatious argument, it was not intellectually good form. In this respect Ruskin had amused and vexed him during his early years. The great critic was not only wrong in matter but in the method of presenting it. Fromentin, on the contrary, pleased him much. The French critic’s mind was of the same order as his own. La Farge had evidently heard of Japanese art in Paris, for in 1863 he began collecting Japanese prints, sending directly to Japan for them. He records that he imported at that time many for himself and his friend Bancroft. He was interested not only in their linear patterns but in their color relations, particularly as shown in landscape. He was painting landscapes at this time and working out-of-doors. “My programme was to paint from nature a portrait and yet to make distinctly a work of art which should remain as a type of the sort of subject I undertook.”