John La Farge and the Judson Memorial Church

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 1998 by Julie L. Sloan, James L. Yarnall

In fact the window on the lawn was the last of seventeen stained-glass windows that La Farge had designed for the Judson Memorial Church on the south side of Washington square in New York City. La Farge made most of the color designs for the glass about 1889, working in the nearby Tenth Street Studio Building. Wright and his artisans then manufactured the windows in their studio, the Decorative Stained Glass Company, at 46 Washington square South, a few doors from the church. No one suspected that sluggish funding for the windows would cause the project to drag out for more than a quarter of a century. Thus, before the last Judson window was completed, La Farge was dead and Wright was reduced to working out of his Montclair house.

The Judson project was the sort of opportunity that La Farge craved. He was ever critical of churches in which memorial windows were provided by a variety of artists working in discordant styles. He felt strongly that all the windows in a given church should be coordinated both with each other and with all other aspects of the architectural decoration, something best accomplished by allowing a single glass artist to work in concert with the architect. The beauty of the Judson windows stems from the latitude extended to La Farge in controlling the scheme. He owed this to the Reverend Edward Judson (1844-1914), the rector of the Berean Baptist Church of Christ in New York City, who conceived the project.

In 1886, Judson decided to replace the congregation's first church building at Bedford and Downing Streets with a new one to commemorate the centennial of the birth of his father, the Reverend Adoniram Judson (1788-1850), who was the first American Baptist missionary to Burma.(2) By February 17, 1888, Judson was negotiating to acquire a lot on Washington square from John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), a fellow Baptist who soon became a major donor to the project.(3) When the lot had been purchased in April or May 1888, Judson commissioned McKim, Mead and White to design the building without the formalities of an architectural competition. The plans were completed by December, and construction took place primarily before April 1891. Work on the campanile and adjoining Judson Hotel, built to produce income for the church, continued until 1893. The total cost was $240,578.(4)

The architects described their Italianate design as "Romanesque, strongly influenced by an early basilica."(5) The terra-cotta exterior is reminiscent of the churches of Florence and Venice and was reportedly calculated to lure Italian immigrants from the Lower East Side of New York City. The interior takes the form of an auditorium with an elaborate baptistery, the focal point of the church service. From the outset, the architects considered stained-glass windows to be integral to their design, as proved by an early elevation of the north facade in which the three openings are filled with the outline of pictorial stained glass. La Farge was named the designer of the glass in a funding solicitation letter sent out by Edward Judson late in 1888.(6) La Farge too was selected without the niceties of a competition, but he was also an obvious choice for the project. His decorative furnishings had been incorporated into McKim, Mead and White buildings routinely for the past decade. He received the Judson commission just before completing one of his best-known projects for Stanford White (1853-1906) - the much admired mural depicting Christ's Ascension in the Church of the Ascension on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street in New York City.(7)

The Judson windows in essence translate Italian Renaissance niche sculptures into pictorial stained glass. Like their prototypes, the windows are arrayed at regular intervals along the walls of the church in order to complete and complement the architecture. To create the fictive niches, La Farge used opalescent glass in colors and textures chosen to mimic colored marble and stone. Into these enclosures are set figures that emulate, but do not replicate, niche sculptures by Italian masters such as Donatello or Verrocchio. In rendering their garments La Farge used many thousands of pieces of glass leaded together in such a way that the viewer can hardly perceive that the windows are made of glass. Exquisite glass painting, applied by Juliet Hanson (w. 1881-c. 1920), who had worked for La Farge in this capacity since 1881, provides flesh passages so realistic as to border on the photographic. As a result of these technical and stylistic traits, the Judson windows are highly pictorial in presentation, blurring the line between easel painting and stained glass. La Farge had his own expression for this pictorial quality that characterizes all his late work in glass: "painting with coloured light."(8)

Even the windows that do not adhere to the niche-sculpture formula defer to Renaissance prototypes. A rose window with the emblems of the four evangelism that is located above the baptistery [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XV OMITTED] is "adapted from stonework designs around Romanesque window openings."(9) Its ornamental loops are composed of glass chosen to mimic colored stone or mosaic. The west wall includes three tondi, or circular windows [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATES XI-XIII OMITTED]. Two of these mimic Renaissance bas-reliefs, and the third is based on a fifteenth-century Italian fresco fragment. On the staircase landings at the entrance to the church, two windows emulate Italian Renaissance mosaics [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XVI OMITTED], and a third is a tondo of a praying angel rendered in the style of a Florentine terra-cotta bas-relief [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XIV OMITTED].