First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

During his travels in Japan with Henry Adams in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the doyen of American impressionist painters, La Farge, wrote with amazing sensitivity his observations about the whole of Japanese society at the time. John La Farge was born in New York in 1835 to a wealthy and artistic family of French descent. He studied art in Paris and then with William Hunt at Newport, Rhode Island. However, he had a unique and complex mind capable of immense subtlety. He studied Japanese wash painting and mastered Mandarin Chinese. He also invented the process later known as Tiffany Glass.