About this work
A peacock perches on a peony tree bearing red and white blossoms, the scene opening onto an intensely green valley beneath a luminous blue sky.
The border of the window is composed of abstract geometric and floral elements that frame the central tableau with quiet architectural authority. La Farge layered his colored glass as a painter would build glazes of colors to achieve the right shade — a method that gives the image an almost atmospheric depth, the tones shifting and pooling the way light does through foliage rather than glass. The tail feathers of the peacock are made of bits of glass in the "broken jewel" technique; each peony blossom is a single piece of glass molded to catch the light differently through the day. The palette — deep iridescent teals and golds, ivory-white and crimson blooms — rewards long looking.
*Peacocks and Peonies II* dates to 1882 , a period when La Farge was at the peak of his powers as a glass innovator, already the holder of patents for opalescent glass techniques that would reshape American decorative art. This window and its companion piece were commissioned by Frederick Lothrop Ames, a railroad magnate who had them installed in the vast, baronial hall of his Boston house. The commission was a defining example of how La Farge's glass moved simultaneously in two directions: toward the domestic interior and toward high art. For the composition, he borrowed from many cultures: the central panels with the bird and flower motif evoke Chinese and Japanese screens; the lower panels emulate Pompeian architecture; and the transoms above recall the tympanum above the door to a Romanesque cathedral. That synthesis — East Asian, classical, and medieval European — in a single work is quintessential La Farge: no single tradition owned him. Today, both windows are held in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
As wall art, this print belongs wherever there is natural light to animate it — a reading room, a formal dining room, a hallway with a south-facing window. The vertical format commands its wall without crowding it. It speaks to the collector drawn to works that sit at the intersection of nature, craft, and cultural exchange: neither purely decorative nor purely fine art, but convincingly, defiantly both. The mood it sets is one of charged stillness — a garden frozen mid-shimmer, regal without being cold.
