I make this suggestion with more confidence, because one can trace in the composition of this picture more than a little of the Japanese arrangement of full and empty spaces; that irregular form of composition which secures a balance by oppositions rather than by repetition of similarities. It is, indeed, the method of the nature student, as true of Velasquez and Rembrandt as of the Japanese. Not that La Farge with his choice appreciation of the old masters could be insensible to the influence of the Italians. His great altarpiece of the Ascension in the Church of the Ascension in New York is reminiscent in its structure of Raphael’s “Disputá.” The space is very similar in shape, and filled with a broad band of figures across the base, a central figure in the upper space, and flanking arcs of angels. Again the mural paintings of “Music” and the “Drama” in the music room of Mr. Whitelaw Reid’s New York house were evidently suggested by the pastoral scenes of the Venetian painters. The latter, however, were themselves, no doubt, suggested by the desire to emancipate painting from the rigidity of preconceived formulas of composition, and it is just this attempt to discover a compromise between the natural and the conventional which is so marked a characteristic of La Farge’s treatment of mural painting.
It may have been an early feeling after this that at least helped to draw him toward Rembrandt, especially toward his religious subjects. I find more than a little of the latter’s influence in the mural paintings in the churches of St. Thomas and of the Incarnation in New York, particularly in the solemn, serious naturalism of the grouping; in the humble devotion with which the spirit of the occasion has been comprehended, and in the significance of gesture and expression, but especially of gesture, through which this spirit has been embodied. A boy’s freshness of faith, dignified by a man’s realization of its import--a quality very rare at any period, and quite likely to be overlooked in this one. It is the outcome of a religious temperament--a thing very different from the religious habit--born of a capacity to feel deeply the significance of things, and by instinct and culture fitted to see the beauty inherent in the significance, whether it be the significance of the spiritual or of the material life or of the subtle analogy between the two. When the painter can comprehend this and set it down on the threshold of every-day experience, in such a way as to make it intimate without being commonplace, its human meaning neither lessening, nor lost in, the splendour of its expression, we may reasonably call him great.