John La Farge (1835 to 1910) was an American painter who came to glass late and, in doing so, changed it. He is credited with the first use of opalescent glass in a window, and with a way of building windows from layers of glass that depended far less on painted detail than the medieval tradition did.
A window for Long Island
La Farge exhibited a window for Dr Richard Derby’s house on Long Island in the autumn of 1879, and within a week he filed a patent application. United States patent 224,831, for a coloured-glass window, was granted on 24 February 1880. Newspapers described the Derby window as the first use of a new material, opalescent glass, in windows. See the glossary for what the term means.
Layers instead of paint
His method was to put pieces of coloured and opalescent glass inside a framework of lead lines, layering them to change and blend the colours. The metal lines shaped and emphasised the design, and the glass did the work that painting did in older windows. It gave gentle changes of colour within a single piece. The method is known in the glossary under plating, although one account notes that simple back-to-back plating gives a rather flat colour, which is why the air space in the rival patent mattered.
The Tiffany rivalry
Louis Comfort Tiffany applied for his own patent in October 1880, eight months after La Farge’s was granted. The two men made similar glass at about the same time and each claimed priority. Around 1880 Tiffany’s father is said to have proposed a partnership, which never came about. The surviving record suggests that La Farge’s patent covered the material and Tiffany’s the assembly, so that neither could make a full opalescent window without the other’s permission. Read more on Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Buildings and windows
La Farge also designed the interior of Trinity Church in Boston in the 1870s, and many of his windows are in churches and houses across the United States.
See also The History of Stained Glass in the USA.
Sources and further reading
More artists
Also on this site: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, Harry Clarke, Marc Chagall, John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens. See all artists.
For the wider story, see Opalescent Glass, Tiffany and the Copper Foil Method and A Short History of Stained Glass.