About this work
The eye lands immediately on a central vertical cascade of peonies — blooms in red, pink, and white — caught mid-movement against a brilliant blue ground. Hues of red and pink meld together in the peonies' glowing petals, while deep greens and golden yellows suggest sun-dappled leaves. The composition is strikingly tall and narrow, framed on all sides by decorative borders in amber and cream, with green glass divisions at the top and bottom. The panel depicts finely leaded and plated glass peonies in red, pink, and white; amber-colored flowers against a cream background form the outer border; green glass divided into three sections runs across the top and bottom. That strict, hierarchical framing is no accident — La Farge recognized that the extreme verticality, flatness, and decorative qualities of Japanese hanging scroll paintings suited them to translation into leaded glass designs, and he made reference to the silk or embroidered borders of the hanging scroll, or *kakemono*, in his window patterns.
*Peonies in the Wind with Kakemono Borders* dates to around 1893 and belongs to a series of at least seven works La Farge created between 1880 and 1909, all based on the theme of peonies in the wind, adapted from Chinese and Japanese handscrolls and porcelains.
This specific example was originally made for the house of John Hay — statesman, Lincoln's former secretary, and one of the most prominent figures in Gilded Age Washington. Estate records show that La Farge had an extensive personal collection of Japanese *kakemono*, several with peony subjects, and the design for his peony window likely came from one of those works. The proportions of the borders were not improvised: as the painter Kenyon Cox observed after visiting La Farge's studio, "the borders, with their relations of width to each other and to the central panel, are according to a Japanese rule for the borders of a Kakemono."
The work achieves the illusionistic effects of a painting but with a luminosity and richness of color unattainable with oil paint, enhanced by sections of opalescent glass — a multicolored iridescent glass developed by La Farge himself.
As a fine art print, this image rewards rooms that can hold its vertical authority — a tall wall between windows, a reading alcove, a stairwell landing. The palette of deep cobalt, jewel-toned crimson, and luminous cream sits comfortably against both dark-painted interiors and pale neutral ones, and the Japanese compositional logic gives it a quality of stillness that high-drama botanical subjects often lack. It speaks to the collector who wants something that has genuine art-historical weight
