Stained-Glass Masters: John La Farge

The Judson Church windows fill the space with truth that’s ethereal and radiant, but truth it is.

N ew York’s in sad shape these days. The nursing home COVID catastrophe, homeless sleeping on the streets, all those stores sacked by the mostly peaceful protesters, a trashed culture sector, rising crime, and people just not wanting to live there . . . all are the new realities as the city slides back to the early ’90s, if not the ’70s.

Though I come from a long line of Protestant ministers, I’m an art historian. My evangelizing surrounds art. New Yorkers could do worse for themselves than going to church, however pagan their beliefs or however much they’re driven by ignorance. I’m a doctor, remember, the art history kind, so don’t ask me to do a tracheotomy, but I’m happy to prescribe some stained glass.

New York City has hundreds of splendid churches, some intimate, some grand. I’ll offer three, for starters, because the glass is so absorbing, it’s addictive, and the three are some of the best work of our two American stained-glass divinities — John La Farge and Louis Tiffany. For La Farge, we’ll look at the distinguished Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square and the Church of the Transfiguration, also called the Little Church Around the Corner, on 29th Street and 5th Avenue. For Tiffany, I’ll write about glass at St. Michael’s Church on the Upper West Side.

I’ll start with La Farge (1835-1910) this week because he’s the oldest and less famous. He’s also the pioneer who defined stained glass after a long period of dormancy. He patented the new process that created opalescent stained glass. This new process allowed multiple sheets of different colored glass to be placed on top of each other, creating what in painting is a mixing of colors. Unlike painting, the different pigments didn’t blend, but they created the capacity for more complex figures, recession into space, and the glass’s pictorial flexibility as light changed.

Tiffany (1848-1932), whom I’ll look at next week, established the studio that produced thousands of stained-glass lamps of blossoms, dragonflies, and geometric shapes that were the signature objects of the Art Nouveau movement. He was also the design director of Tiffany & Co., his father’s jewelry business. Tiffany was a talented painter, too, though his career was in design, an entrepreneur, and as a brand name. I’ll do a bit more about La Farge since the two feuded.

For La Farge, I’d suggest the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South for a few reasons. The church is an impressive Romanesque Revival building designed in 1892 by McKim, Mead, and White. The Gilded Age might evoke rapacity, but greed and religion aren’t unusual bedfellows. Just think of some of the popes in my stories earlier this fall on Raphael. In New York, the period from the 1880s through the 1920s was one of immense wealth and lavish church construction. The church is not only active but thriving, and it’s a handsome building with a facade of thin yellow brick and a squat Romanesque tower.

There are 14 La Farge stained-glass windows. La Farge designed them for the building, starting in 1892 but working on them periodically until his death. It’s not a complicated doctrinal program. There’s a set of round windows depicting a musical angel, the weeping Mary, and the Good Shepherd. Each has the central figure encircled by a decorative wreath, yellow bands, and a memorial inscription made in outline-only orange letters. These are on the west and get hit by the afternoon sun. Each looks like a blazing sun with the figure in the center, set in a deep blue background.

On the east side of the church are six tall narrow vertical windows, each depicting a full-length saint framed by a geometrical shape. On the north side are three windows depicting St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John the Evangelist. They’re 15 feet tall. Another rondel, on the south wall, is a Greek cross surrounded by symbols of the Four Evangelists, Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It was designed together by La Farge and Maitland Armstrong (1836-1918).

For the round windows in the north side of the building, La Farge wanted sheer dazzle. They’re the most emotional figures: the crying mother, the musical angel, and Jesus with a big fat sheep. The east and north windows are figures of gravity and rectitude. They’re not going to be your best buds, La Farge tells us. The figures have presence, too. La Fargo’s opalescent glass discovery relieved stained-glass figures of their flatness and creakiness. Layers of color invited the contemplation of a body beneath the newly animated, complex drapery. Of course, the intensity of color underscores the intensity of belief and experience looking at the windows was meant to inspire.

I first saw the Judson windows in the late 1990s, when I was a curator at the Clark Art Institute and the windows were sent to Cummings Glass Studio in next door North Adams for conservation. Church stained glass is a very difficult proposition. La Farge’s technique was new, and the environment for stained glass is a vast church space on one side, sporadically heated and cooled, and the various weather New York presents. The lead had sagged and weakened, threatening the glass. It was an expensive conservation process, and Judson’s mission is a social-service one then involving the poor and people with AIDS.

The church had a couple of lucky breaks from bequests. The city’s art foundations helped, too. I remember the cost was $1 million — then and now a staggering amount for a church.

Restored, the windows fill the space with truth that’s ethereal and radiant, but truth it is.

As a young scholar of American art, I wondered why La Farge wasn’t more famous. He was certainly good at everything he did, and that includes painting, design, architecture, and scholarship. His stained-glass commissions are gorgeous, and though he’s best known for decorating Trinity Church in Boston, the Judson work is just as good. La Farge won’t occupy a box, and art historians love to put their specimens in boxes, or formaldehyde filled jars. As a painter — and most of La Farge’s paintings are landscapes, seascapes, or still lifes — he’s in a limbo between Homer and Eakins on the one hand and the Ash Can artists on the other.

In that limbo, he’s an odd duck. Also, much of La Farge’s work was in stained glass, which is both religious art and applied art, or decorative art, and American paintings scholars, as a rule, don’t like either. Religious art is, well, about God. Paintings people think stained glass is one step up from pottery. I could never understand why, since it’s so close to painting.

A word on La Farge’s palette in the Judson Church project. In 1890 and 1891, La Farge traveled throughout the South Seas. Very few Americans had ever been there, and his visit coincided with Gauguin’s. La Farge clearly had a hue revolution in mind when he invented his new stained-glass techniques in the late 1870s and early 1880s, but the iridescence of South Seas color must have inspired him in the Judson project. The intensity and range of color, from flowers to water to sunsets, are things he never experienced before.

I also know the Judson Church as one of the earliest recipients of John D. Rockefeller’s immense philanthropy. I did some research a couple of years ago about the evolution of Rockefeller philanthropy from personal and mostly religious to expert-driven and all-encompassing, except for evangelical religion. The Rockefeller Foundation developed this change in its support for the church.

Rockefeller started supporting the church and his minister, Edward Judson, in 1882. It was a Baptist church, and almost all of his early giving went to Baptist causes. Judson’s father was a Baptist evangelist famous for converting thousands of Burmese to the Baptist faith and translating the Bible into Burmese. His son’s church evangelized among the neighborhood’s large Italian immigrant population. Rockefeller considered him a saint on earth.

For someone so relentless and so ruthless in business, in giving to Baptist causes Rockefeller nearly becomes a romantic, full of giddy enthusiasm, easily flattered, and even gullible. Judson was a piece of work, passionate about great causes, though whether his fondest cause was the church or his ambition or self-aggrandizement is a question.

Rockefeller supported, mostly without question, Judson’s transformation of a tiny ministry with a gospel of austerity and fervor in a simple building to a big New York religious fundraising machine in a McKim, Mead & White Romanesque Revival pile with the La Farge windows.

In the late 1880s into the 1890s, Rockefeller Senior gave to help build the new church, establish an endowment that grew to $500,000, and support the annual fund. He was beguiled by Judson’s charm and purported success in achieving Senior’s ideal: an orthodox Baptist church, a community center for the poor, and conversions of hardcore Catholics to Protestant ways.

I read the Judson church file in the Rockefeller Foundation archives. Judson managed to find endless paths from manipulating “no” into “well, yes, but for one more year only.” He leavened complex asks to Senior with gallows humor about donors who promised bequests or bought church annuities but continued to live long beyond their expected expirations. “She’s too mean to die,” he wrote about one holder of a church annuity. Possibly not the best thing to say to someone like Senior, who was both very old and reputed to be heartless, but Judson played Senior, positioning himself as a supplicant but also confidant and close friend.

It was Rockefeller’s son, John, Jr., who introduced expert opinion and numbers-driven evaluation to the family’s generosity. Junior and the early staff realized the Judson Church had become too grand and lost touch with its mission. Judson spent too much of his time raising money rather than evangelizing.

Junior was in the process of hiring a professional staff and introducing accountability. The first target was Judson’s church. The staff itemized for Junior how meager were the results of Judson’s ministry in terms of hard numbers such as christenings, Sunday School enrollment, and church attendance. Slowly but surely, Judson was cut off. By the time he died in 1914, the Rockefeller Foundation was making only a $100 annual fund gift and a yearly $25 gift for Christmas flowers.

The Judson Church today might seem at first glance as a social-justice-warrior church but, to its credit, it does a million things and is heavily involved now in the coronavirus crisis, homeless issues, and the spiritual needs of the neighborhood, as it should be. It’s an arts space, too. It’s an exemplary steward of the La Farge windows, understands their history, and sees them as essential parts of its identity.