Nature, the world of the eye, is always singing to the painter.

—John La Farge, quoted in 1896

The peony as a subject for a decorative window would have struck even many late-nineteenth-century viewers as an unusual design motif. Peonies were best known in Japan, and at the time La Farge began using the flower as a window design element, the peony was just beginning to enjoy new found popularity among American connoisseurs of flowers. Identifying La Farge's motif in the 1880s even proved to be a source of some confusion among those who were still unfamiliar with the exotic bloom. Some viewers and critics mistook the peonies depicted in La Farge's glass for roses on a bush.

The Japanese regard for the peony was the most direct spur to the rise of the peony craze in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. Visitors traveled to Japan in increasing numbers during those years and collected objects that documented the Japanese cult of the peony.

Associated as they were with femininity, peonies adorned highly collectible Japanese kimonos, which were worn as fashionable leisure garments by American women who had traveled to Japan themselves or simply followed the latest trend.

Unlike the other windows shown here, the Seattle Art Museum's peony-design window by La Farge was never installed in a home. It remained in La Farge's studio to his death, when it was sold at an auction of the artist's estate. Because we do not know what led La Farge to create this particular version of the window, it is difficult to know precisely when it was made and how it relates to those extant windows that were done as architectural commissions. La Farge may have made the window as a working model for himself, even changing it at some point by 1908, as he further considered color and light effects.

In his compulsion to create, as he put it, "light by colors," La Farge was drawn to painting in transparent watercolor. He understandably used watercolor to plan his window designs, painting in brilliant hues and color washes applied thinly onto the white paper to create the effect of light shining through colored glass. This large—it is almost the size of the museum's window itself—and elaborate watercolor was possibly a presentation piece La Farge made for a prospective client who commissioned a peony-designed window for his townhouse in Washington, D.C., in 1890.

This window, the earliest known example of La Farge's peony design, was created for the palatial home of Henry G. Marquand (1819-1902) in Newport, Rhode Island.

This version was created by La Farge for the London studio of painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912).

This version of La Farge's peony-design window was first exhibited in London in 1889 and then may have made its way to Paris and the much anticipated world's fair, the Universal Exposition of 1889, which would have been an important showcase for La Farge's modern, Japanese-inspired designs. This example, like the Seattle Art Museum window, was not created for a specific architectural setting; it was, rather, an exhibition piece.

The contrasts of density and transparency have always been very interesting to me, and the basis of my idea was in a large way the recall of the inlays of precious stones that are set in jade by Eastern artists.

—John La Farge, in a report to the French government on his new techniques of glass making, 1893

It appeared that the modern materials and processes of glassmaking might give to the artist in glass a "palette" such as the medieval man had never possessed. . . . To this, then, La Farge set himself; to obtain glass of richness, depth, and glow of color hitherto unattempted, and in a multitude of tints.

—Critic Russell Sturgis, "John La Farge," Scribner's Magazine, July 1899

What is called opal glass, opaline, and also opalescent glass may be said to have formed the basis of a new system of window decoration . . . . Uncolored opaline glass has a milky-white look when seen by reflected light; but by transmitted light its color passes from a cloudy bluish-gray to red, with a yellow spark. If, now, such glass be charged with color of many shades, the chromatic effects producible by the combination of such translucent materials, at once contrasting in color and harmonized by the opaline quality, might prove successful beyond what had been known.

—Critic Russell Sturgis, "John La Farge," Scribner's Magazine, July 1899

La Farge recognized that the extreme verticality, flatness and decorative qualities of Japanese hanging scroll paintings suited them to translation into leaded glass designs. He even made reference to the silk or embroidered borders of the hanging scroll, or kakemono, in his window patterns. American painter Kenyon Cox (1856-1919), who wrote at length about La Farge's peony-design window after studying what is now the Seattle Art Museum's example when he visited La Farge's studio in 1908, explained about the care and informed understanding that went into La Farge's layout of the border design: "It is interesting to note that 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."

Estate records show that La Farge had an extensive collection of Japanese kakemono, several with peony subjects. The design for his peony window likely came from a kakemono in La Farge's personal collection.