Three Saints (Alternate Study for Chapel Windows, Caldwell House, Newport)

La Farge rendered the study in a strictly monochromatic palette of diluted ink or watercolor washes in black, white, and gray tones. The brushwork is fluid and sketchy, employing a wet-on-wash technique that allows pigment to pool and creates broad gestural strokes. This handling suggests form rather than delineating it precisely, resulting in a preparatory and informal finish. Loosely indicated cloudy or atmospheric spaces fill the background of each panel. The composition is unified on a single sheet with visible borders between the three vertical sections, and a signature or inscription appears in the lower right corner of the rightmost panel.

Created circa 1886 to 1887, this watercolor is an alternate study for the figurative stained glass windows La Farge produced for the Caldwell sisters' private chapel in Newport. The final windows were completed in 1890 to 1891. When the Caldwell house was demolished in 1931, the finished windows were relocated to the convent of St. Patrick's Church in Fall River, Massachusetts. Following the convent's demolition in 2004, the finished windows were acquired by Salve Regina University, which constructed the Our Lady of Mercy Chapel in 2010 to house them. This preparatory work, however, remained in private hands until it was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Susan Dwight Bliss in 1966, receiving the accession number 67.55.177a-c.

This study belongs to La Farge's broader artistic project to revive the art of stained glass while building on traditional ideals to foster an American Renaissance. For the Caldwell commission, La Farge drew upon Renaissance models, specifically copying Raphael's Sistine Madonna for the central Virgin Mary. La Farge admired Raphael's reconciliation of earthly beauty and spiritual perfection, viewing it as a synthesis of paganism and Christianity. The selection of saints for the Caldwell windows was highly personalized: Saint Elizabeth of Hungary shared a name with the Caldwell sisters' mother, Mary Eliza Breckenridge, and Saint John the Evangelist was the patron saint of John Lancaster Spalding, the priest who co-managed the Caldwell estate and served as the sisters' spiritual advisor.