About this work
*Peacocks and Peonies I* is a stained-glass window created in 1882, and it announces itself with the unmistakable authority of an artist at the height of his powers. The composition borrows from many cultures at once: the central panels, with their 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. The palette is dense with jewel-like color — deep teals, luminous greens, and the soft blush of peony blossoms — rendered with a technical audacity that sets it apart from anything else of its era. The tail feathers of the peacocks are built from bits of glass in a "broken jewel" technique, while each peony blossom is a single piece of glass molded to catch the light differently through the day.
La Farge layered his colored glass as a painter would build glazes of color to achieve the right shade, giving the surface a depth that seems to breathe and shift.
The window was commissioned by Frederick Lothrop Ames, a railroad magnate who had it installed in the vast, opulent hall of his Boston home. The date — 1882 — places it squarely in the period when La Farge had already secured his patents for opalescent glass and was defining what American decorative art could be. The work reflects the Gilded Age's fascination with medieval art and craftsmanship, a time when art glass remained an emblem of wealth and good taste even as industrialization made ordinary glass widely available. Within La Farge's body of work, *Peacocks and Peonies I* is among his most complete statements: a single object that synthesizes East Asian aesthetics, classical antiquity, and Gothic ecclesiastical tradition into something entirely his own.
As a fine art print, this image carries the visual weight of a window without demanding architecture to support it. It suits spaces where natural light plays across a wall — a stairwell, a study, a room with morning sun — and rewards close looking as much as it commands attention from across a room. The viewer it speaks to most directly is someone drawn to ornament as idea: those who understand that beauty and intellectual rigor are not opposites, but here, in La Farge's hands, are one and the same.
