In the latest University Bookman, Stephen Schmalhofer takes a trip “From New York to Chartres with La Farge” and examines this macabre Providence artist’s later stained-glass work and his influence on other creatives of his time.

Adams came to understand that gothic architecture was not gloomy. “The necessity for light was the motive of the gothic architects,” he writes of Chartres. “They needed light and always more light, until they sacrificed safety and common-sense in trying to get it.” Cortissoz observes that La Farge’s art contained “little knots of form, meant to hold color in solution; cunningly wrought webs in which to imprison light” and his windows were “curtains of jewels hung between us and the light, pieces of some new kind of luminous poetry.”

I’d previously noted the early print illustration work of this Providence artist, in my post on “A macabre Providence artist”. There I observed that Lovecraft’s discovery of him had coincided with the writing of “The Rats in the Walls”.