A Country Scene

John La Farge · July 1848

Medium

Graphite with smudging, heightened with lead white gouache, on blue wove paper

Original size

27 × 38 cm (10 11/16 × 15 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Drawn in the summer of 1848, this quiet pastoral sketch reveals John La Farge at the very beginning of his artistic life — working in graphite and lead white gouache on blue wove paper with a sensitivity well beyond his thirteen years. La Farge would go on to become one of America's most celebrated decorative artists, renowned for his luminous stained glass and large-scale murals, but this early country scene shows the observational instincts that underpinned all of it. The technique itself — smudged graphite built up in tonal layers, with touches of white gouache catching light against the cool blue ground — was a classical academic exercise, yet La Farge uses it to capture the particular stillness of a rural afternoon rather than simply demonstrating draughtsmanship. La Farge later trained under William Morris Hunt in Newport and travelled to France, where he absorbed the influence of Delacroix and the Barbizon painters. That sensibility for mood and atmospheric light is already present, tentatively, in this modest sheet. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates the soft tonal range of the original drawing into paint, preserving its sense of open air and gentle quietude — a faithful tribute to one of American art's most versatile and underappreciated figures.