La Farge’s glass-work carried over the greater part of his artistic life. Mr. Cortissoz tells us that he did several thousand windows of various patterns and designs. For many years, and up to his death, he had a shop in South Washington Square where, with assistants and workmen, the more mechanical part of window construction was carried on. But he looked after every part of it from start to finish. He never let go of his workman, never allowed himself as a designer to be eliminated by turning his design over wholly to the shop. He followed up everything and exacted results while inspiring enthusiasm and intelligence in his men. The result was that the work, in spite of the touch of others, remained peculiarly that of La Farge and bore his individual stamp. In window-making he tried dozens of different experiments to get depth, variation, and complement of tone by repeated platings of pot-metal glass. As a result he produced brilliant jewel-like glass theretofore never dreamed of. With iridescent and opalescent sheets at hand in countless tones and shades he began the construction of his window, not in patches of color, but with a crayon cartoon, just as he had designed pictures. He made a pattern, filled the spaces rightly, and thought of the colors afterward. The lead lines helped out the design and did not break or block it by haphazard crossings at stated intervals. In other words, his radiant color schemes were every one of them based in design and had a foundation of drawing under them. “This, then, is a study of line and is different from the notion of some intellectual friends that the line is to be put on afterward.”[9] [9] La Farge in a letter to Mr. Cortissoz. And yet there was no attempt to do in glass what could be better done on canvas. The brilliant transparent tones were peculiarly fitted for glass because they could not be squeezed out of a tube or laid down with a brush. I recall seeing in his shop years ago a tall narrow window, done, if I remember rightly, for the Whitney house, showing a robed female figure scattering autumn leaves upon a pool. The brilliant autumn tints, the light from the reflecting water, would have been impossible to render fully with pigments, and the blending of light and air seemed attainable only with La Farge’s delicate opaline glass. It seemed to me at the time a quite wonderful window, and yet he did many of them pitched in the same key of splendor.