A Clan Hangs

A large number of dowagers crowded into the ancient elevator of New York's Wildenstein Galleries last week to ride up to a most extraordinary family exhibi-tion--the work of the talented La Farges, children and grandchildren of the late great John La Farge, mural painter, designer of stained glass windows. Many a U. S. family boasts greater painters, few can claim such a diffusion of talent as the clan La Farge.

Lank, myopic John La Farge was born in New York in 1835, son of a French emigre from Santo Domingo who had made a fortune in real estate in Louisiana and New York. He died in Providence, R. I. 75 years later. A confirmed aristocrat and cosmopolite, he traveled extensively, read voraciously, married Margaret Mason Perry, a granddaughter of Oliver Hazard ("We-have-met-the-enemy-and -they -are -ours") Perry. He rather disliked and distrusted the U. S. scene, the U. S. citizenry. In his later years it gave him an actual physical revulsion to shake hands with or touch strangers. As an artist he had a magnificent sense of composition, easily held his own in a generation of great draughtsmen: Sargent, Homer, Pennell, Abbey. Critics rate him among his contemporaries somewhere between Edwin Blashfield and John Singer Sargent. Like theirs, his mural paintings were always in the Grand Manner, highly symbolical.

John La Farge had a penchant for figures heavily swathed in classical draperies, which made his murals slightly reminiscent of tableaux in a Turkish bath. Extreme modernists, forgetting his very great gifts, damn him most heartily for the innumerable stained glass windows which he designed. They were confected from a La Farge invention, opalescent glass (for which he was made an officer of the French Legion of Honor), a substance that gave the effect of light through the bottom of a soap dish. His best friend was Henry ("The Education of") Adams. With him he made a voyage to Tahiti, lived on the island at the same time as that morose genius Paul Gauguin, whom the two U. S. elegants successfully avoided.

Several of John La Farge's South Sea sketches were on view last week. But Manhattan socialites were more interested in the opera of his sons and grandchildren. There were eleven of them in the show, ranging from 69-year-old Christopher Grant to 16-year-old John II. Water-colors by the three sons, Artist Bancel, Architect Christopher Grant, Retired Banker Oliver Hazard Perry, showed that they had drunk deep of Father John's medicine. Largest exhibits were the enormous cartoons for the mosaic tympanum of Washington's Trinity College Chapel by Son Bancel and Grandson Thomas Sergeant.

Dilettante painting is far from the La Farges' only accomplishment. Son Christopher Grant La Farge was first architect for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, succeeded in erecting the gigantic columns and romanesque choir, which his successor the mystically Gothic Ralph Adams is busily altering. Manhattanites remember Christopher Grant La Farge as designer of most of the buildings in the Bronx Zoo and of New York's subway kiosks. His two lank sons, both contributors to the family exhibition, are Christopher, known as "Kipper," and Oliver, known as "Ink." Kipper is an architect, likewise an able amateur actor. Ink is an ethnologist, .knows a vast deal about the Amerindians, was author of last year's Pulitzer Prize novel, Laughing Boy.

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