Artist. He was an American artist of the 19th century with a career in illustration, murals, interior design, painting, stained glass, as well as authoring art textbooks. Born in New York City to wealthy French parents, he was raised bilingual, speaking both French and English. Receiving his first artistic training at the age of six, he learned to use watercolors while still in grammar school. At the age of 24, after studying law for a time, he went to Paris to study painting under Thomas Couture. Returning to the United States in 1859, he settled in Newport, Rhode Island, to begin his career as an artist. There, he studied with American romantic artist William Morris Hunt. His earliest drawings and landscapes, from his studies in Newport, show marked originality, especially in the handling of color values. Many of his mythological and religious paintings, including "Virgil," were executed in an area of Rhode Island known as "Paradise," in a forest which La Farge called "The Sacred Grove" after Virgil. Between 1859 and 1870, he illustrated Tennyson's "Enoch Arden" and Robert Browning's "Men and Women." An artist of broad cultural interests, he was a pioneer in the study of Japanese art, the influence of which is seen in his work. In 1876, he was commissioned to design the interior of Trinity Church in Boston, Massachusetts. These murals and stained-glass designs were greatly admired, leading to a number of important commissions for public buildings, including St. Thomas's Church in New York City in 1878, the Church of the Ascension in New York City in 1888, as well as private commissions for prominent patrons, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt. He also worked in watercolor, using this medium to develop sketches for his murals and stained-glass compositions. Among his best-known watercolor paintings are those made during his travels, particularly those during his visit to the South Seas in 1890 and 1891. He authored eight books and numerous essays on art in order to establish a sound tradition of the fine arts in the United States. Some of his books are "Considerations on Painting" in 1895, "An Artist's Letters from Japan" in 1897, and "The Higher Life in Art" in 1908. His 1902 stained glass work, "Fortune and Her Wheel," commissioned by industrialist Henry Clay Frick, is in the lobby of the Frick Building in downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He continued to produce art, mostly decorative stained glass and murals, write, and travel until his death.