Art as history/history as art: John La Farge and the problem of representation, 1859--1910

In his Collected Papers, the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce wrote, "the real is that which is not whatever we happen to think of it, but is unaffected by what we may think of it."1 Peirce was born in 1839, four years after the American artist John La Farge. And Peirce's simple formula of the Real echoed the convictions of many artists of his generation, who famously challenged the recipes of the Academy in the interest of reclaiming raw experience.;In this dissertation I aim to show how John La Farge, one of the most prominent artists of his time and a painter-theorist of unrecognized subtlety, strove to enact and articulate an art of the Real. La Farge did not mean, thereby, to pioneer a new way of seeing and representing; rather he hoped to explain and justify age-old artistic practices that were being questioned in the years immediately preceding the rise of abstraction.;La Farge's work sheds important light on early "modernist" art. For if his oeuvre is any indication, stylistic developments that have been perceived as "progressive" (consider La Farge's own proto-Impressionist landscapes of the 1860s) may actually have emerged in response to perennial philosophical issues. And La Farge's project is also of living value to twenty-first-century historians. For when he articulated how to represent the "Real" in the post-Academic West, La Farge also addressed the phenomenon of historiography as purportedly "true" representation. In so doing, he anticipated the dilemmas of many avowedly "postmodern" historians and scholars.;1 This is Peirce's own early summary of the "Realist" position, cited in The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce , ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1868): 5.311. Peirce called himself a Realist in 1903. See Collected Papers, 5.77 n1.