John La Farge's Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890-1891 by Elizabeth Hodermarsky with essays by Elizabeth Childs, Henry Adams, John Stuart Gordon and Anna Arabindan-Kesson: Book Reviews

John La Farge's Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890-1891 Elizabeth Hodermarsky with essays by Elizabeth Childs, Henry Adams, John Stuart Gordon and Anna ArabindanKesson. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, in Association with Yale University Press, 2010. Artist John La Farge and historian Henry Adams made an extended tour of the South Seas in 1890. On that tour, La Farge filled twelve sketchbooks, took photographs, and made visual studies of the places and people he visited. He subsequently relied on that visual record as source material for works of art for twenty years. John La Farge's Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890-1891 is a beautifully illustrated catalogue of an exhibition that was anchored by the eleven sketchbooks from the Yale University Art Gallery collection and one from the Getty Museum collection. Elizabeth Hodermarsky s introduction locates La Farge's South Seas images within his career and contextualizies his Pacific trip within a trend for American and European travel to an exotic, and exoticized, South Seas. In her visual analysis of South Seas imagery created both in the Pacific and after his return, Hodermarsky claims that the color and light of the Pacific islands enhanced his "use of color as an expressive force" (6) and that the region functioned symbolically for him as a "prehistoric earth before the coming of man" (28). Elizabeth C. Childs contributes two thoroughly researched and skillfully argued chapters addressing American and European cultural and visual constructions of South Seas cultures as "primitive" and examining several layers and kinds of colonial looking as well as constructed exoticisms employed by tourists and artists visiting the Pacific islands. She further explores how La Farge's culturally constructed vision of the South Seas shaped and formed his onsite artistic vision, and impacted the works of art that he created for the New York market on his return to the United States. Childs demonstrates that La Farge's visual encounter was inflected with cultural assumptions about the South Seas: as promising the exotic, the "primitive," the remnants of a premodern myth, and as a place of adventure, ethnographic study, and visually "decorative" places and people. Childs makes a particularly astute argument about the tensions surrounding La Farge's contact with Island Women, both as hosts and as social equals, or even superiors, and also as "natives," including the fictional trope of the "Old Gold Girl" (the most "authentic" Island girls were reputed to have skin the color of old gold). Childs also provides an insightful analysis of the role played by tourist photography in La Farge's exoticizing vision. Childs' second essay examines the proximate travels of La Farge to the South Seas with those of the French artist Paul Gauguin. She extends a compelling contrast between American and French perceptions of the South Seas and the personal visual interpretations of La Farge and Gauguin. Childs anchors her comparison in six propositions: preconditioned vision, looking framed by actual experience, cultural and individual nostalgia for "vanishing races," visual production for art markets at home, the way that visual "sensation" overrode actual topography in art making, and the significance of class differences in human and artistic encounter. …