JOHN LAFARGE (1835 1910) Study of Reef Tautira Tahiti

Sale 2696 - Lot 36

Price Realized: $ 10,000

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000

JOHN LAFARGE (1835 - 1910)
Study of Reef, Tautira, Tahiti.

Watercolor and gouache on paper, circa 1891. 280x324 mm; 11x12¾ inches.

Provenance
Swann Auction Galleries, New York, June 12, 2014, lot 21.
Private collection, New York.

Literature
Art Property of John La Farge, Boston Evening Transcript, March 20, 1911, page 10 (illustrated).
La Farge, Reminiscences of the South Seas, 1912, Garden City, New York, page 302 (illustrated).
R. Yarnall, Recreation and Idleness: The Pacific Travels of John La Farge, 1998, New York, page 98 (illustrated).

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Additional Details

John LaFarge arrived in the isolated village of Tautira the evening of February 27, 1891 and stayed there until he left for Papara the week of April 3. The present watercolor, or a nearly identical one, was illustrated in Elizabeth Hodermarsky John LaFarge's Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890-1891 (2010). Hodermarsky wrote that LaFarge was especially fascinated with the reef at Tautira, and his sketchbook Tahiti & a little Samoa contains several sketches of this natural wonder. There were likely several iterations of this composition; as Dr. James L. Yarnall wrote of the present work when first offered at Swann in 2014: "La Farge routinely replicated his South Seas watercolors or made close variations of them, and he used these to fill in his various South Seas exhibitions, of which there were both American and French versions. This is a thoroughly documented and a well-known watercolor." In the American Art Association's catalogue of John LaFarge's estate (1910), the artist's words were used to describe his inspiration: "Tahiti, 1891: To go to the reef which runs along exactly like a great causeway, some forty feet wide, as if built for a sea wall, and except a curve on either side quite level; and to see the great waves break against this wall, then run in innumerable ripples over the edge into the quiet water inside the reef. Still water on this side, and shallow. Evening, looking north."